Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-24473195-20150608095528

Nathan2000 wrote:

By the way, this is also the problem I have with templates in general. When I edit them, they usually require some complicated parameters that I can't set in the preview. I need to invoke the template, but my changes won't show up until I save it and purge the page. Sometimes I make mistakes and end up with a lot more edits than I needed. Or should I be happy about bumping up my stats? That's unavoidable with bad template design, and a side-effect of overloading the usage of templates. When they were originally designed they were only meant to transclude text or simple figures. But as mediawiki required more and more things, they added more functionality into parserfunctions(PFs), breeding bad practices that will remain until PFs are dead and buried. Now Frankenstein  (PF-based templates) is too hard for mediawiki to control anymore. These bad practices run so deep that editors think nothing of adding some complex code like the image below.

A good template would have to make use of dozens of templates to become readable. That's programming 101, each function/module should do just one task. Trouble is  that it will still have to transclude dozens of pages each making it take more and more time to load. My suggestion is that for complex templates one should ditch wikitext and use lua.

Anyway, as far as CSS and these new potBoxes are concerned, the easiest way to test the styling on the infoboxes is to preview the infobox, copy the code for the infobox, paste it into a page, play around with it, and merge the css into the Special:CSS once you're done.