User:ChaoticShadow/Creating Portable Infoboxes

Work in Progress

Hello! This blog, as its title suggests is about building portable infoboxes.

Introduction
What are portable infoboxes? In short they are Wikia's self proclaimed evolution of the 'classic infobox' (What are those? See here.) PI (portable infoboxes, and henceforth I shall call them this now) is in an XML format, similar to HTML, and if you are familiar with HTML, you should know for each tag opened, they must also be closed with their respective tag, that is, if the tag isn't self-closing. So for example,  must be closed with , while   is self-closing, so it doesn't need another tag after it.

Similar to, infoboxes must start and end with the   tags. Various tags do inside this "umbrella" tag which creates how an infobox looks.

Basic Syntax & Elements
I'm going to go ahead and list every tag that will be used in a PI (self closing tags will be listed with a "/"):

I will now breakdown every tag, as well as any changes, if any, you can do. Now most of these tags only have the "source" attribute, for people who have used the old syntax to code infoboxes, it is the same as " ", as the value of the "source" attribute is whatever would go inside the triple curly braces.

With this tag, the most you can do is either  or. The difference? If the layout is stacked, that means that the label for a certain "cell" is directly above it, rather than to the left of it, like what most infoboxes have.

Pretty self-explanatory based on it's name, its the "title"of the infobox, so anything in the infobox should be related to it. When filling it's parameter, most of the time it should be the same as the title of the page itself, but there are some exceptions. This tag only has one attribute: "source." As previously explained, it's value should be the name of the parameter. This tag has two variants, self closing and non-self closing (what else can I name it).

With the non-self closing tag, you can add a  tag inside it, which makes the title to default to whatever is inside that default tag, if there was nothing inputted for the parameter when using the template. Another tag is the  tag which formats the value of the parameter (the value of the "source" attribute). More will be explained below.

Relevant links

 * Help:Infoboxes