Help:Infoboxes

Infoboxes are like fact sheets, or sidebars in magazine articles, designed to present a summary of the topic of the page. They present important points in an organized and quickly readable format. The sections of an infobox are usually the same from article to article to create consistency across the wikia. Infoboxes are made with templates.

How to use
The first thing you need to do is email Special:Contact and ask for the Portable Infobox extension to be enabled on your wikia.

You can add an infobox through source mode on an article by copying the syntax on the template's documentation page (found at the bottom of the infobox template's page) and pasting it at the top of an article, changing the words after the equals signs to provide the information needed. For example:

Creating new infoboxes


First, create new template, with any name you like, for example Template:ExampleInfobox. Lets start with infobox base, which is title and image.

This wikitext will tell your template to use name and image variables for title and image elements. Additionally you can provide default tag, which value will be used instead when variable is not provided or empty.

Right now we only need fields containing additional information, lets add one.

One more and infobox will be ready to use. After adding last field with source set to first and label to First seen we can invoke template in an article with data to get working infobox.

And your template ends up like this:

Styling and Display
The infobox is already styled. It is using you wikia's theme. If you change colors in Theme Designer, the infobox will automatically adjust. If any of the variables is empty, it won't be displayed (unless the default tag is invoked).

Advanced usage
Now, that you have created a simple infobox, you can learn how to use more advanced fields. In this section we are going to build infobox shown on the right.

Building advanced infoboxes
There are three normal key-value fields, then title and image fields. As you can see, the title field is not bound to be a first field, but you can only use the Title field once per infobox.

Next field will let you put a number of fields into group, each of which can be named with header. Remember: fields that are declared but don't have a value won't appear. This rule also applies to group - if none of the fields (excluding header tag) inside any particular group have a value, the whole thing won't show up.

Details

And now the hardest of all, comparison tag. It gives you an easy way to compare two forces, especially useful in battle or war infoboxes.

Comparison contains set tags, each of which defines compared values. In header tag you can put name of the compared value. For inside use other fields introduced before, for example data tag. Combatants Details Combatants

Now we just need to invoke it inside article, and the work is done.

Available Tags
All infobox fields should be declared using XML convention, with attributes used for field configuration.