Forum:External links and templates not working

On the Traveller Wiki we're having an interesting problem with getting template and some external links to work together properly. Specifically, we have a Sources template for registering authors. We want to include a parameterised url external link: e.g. Traveller Atlas. Note there is a "?" in the url. If you remove the ? part of the url, it shows up in the template, but not as it is listed. Now what? Tjoneslo 23:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Maybe try encoding it as %3F: Traveller Atlas . --Splarka (talk) 03:17, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Nope, that did not work either. Tjoneslo 15:39, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Substitute your code to this code:

and if you want to make it more easy put the [] beside each  like this   that way you will only have to put the

This is a temporal example i use the Wikia:Sandbox to test it

--Cizagna (Talk) 20:55, 3 March 2007 (UTC) Oh forgot the explanation, the problem from what i have read in the helps of mediawiki is with the "?" its take some way by the parser function so in order to resolve it what i come out with a previous help and did a parser function but only to check if fields its blank, we use css code to hide the row in case there is nothing and if there is something it will be display and the field will be separate from the inside instructions of the parse function making it viewable, for the cases i have seen parser functions and table html dont mix very well...--Cizagna (Talk) 21:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * That worked perfectly. Thank you very much for your help. Tjoneslo 01:36, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Just a note, using CSS tricks to hide unused table content has been deprecated on Wikipeda. It should be done using parserfunctions to actually generate the table rows serverside (but this isn't easy on Wikia at the moment, without Tidy installed). --Splarka (talk) 04:49, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


 * The original template did just that, but you can't combine the template and the {| |} table format unless you do the above (or there is some other trick I'm missing. And the original didn't work. Tjoneslo 14:11, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Create a template call "!" and and put "|" so any time you need to the pipe in a parser function you call the template |, the template i gave you will translate like this:


 * My issues are that the when trying to work with the tables it respects the lines so you end up with a bunch of empty lines the only way i have found to resolve the issue is by chaining the parser functions and it works perfectly but if by mistake you jump one of the fields (eg; s1,s2,s4,s5) the following fields will not appear at oppose of the css solution.--Cizagna (Talk) 19:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


 * The trick is, to get the empty lines to appear between the and  where they can be ignored. If they are not ignored, the wikicode will insert    and cause annoyance. I've had good luck with:


 * See also  --Splarka (talk) 22:24, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, that also worked, once I created the Template: ! in the Traveller wiki. Thank you everyone for their help. Unless and until something else breaks, I'll probably leave this one alone. Tjoneslo 23:30, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I've always prefered the css trick over the template trick. Mostly because the css trick was the first one I came up with on my own (never new of the ! tempate till I saw someone else have it). But my reasoning for the use of the css is that | makes it hard to read the code, and after that, not only does it make it imposible for other users who already had a hard time understanding the code, It also makes it extremely tough for me to debug it. But that asside, I'm looking at what you're doing, and wouldn't a list be a much better choice than a table? For that matter, if you were opposed to requiring CSS to remove the bullets in the list, using  would still work better than using the table. Dantman (Talk) 06:51, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

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I think either of these would work beter. Of course using the former, you would create a CSS Class and place it's name in place of ??? and change what the bullet shows up as. Dantman (Talk) 07:00, 5 March 2007 (UTC)


 * (Dantman wrote): But that aside, I'm looking at what you're doing, and wouldn't a list be a much better choice than a table?
 * Probably, but I'm a simple unfrozen caveman, used to doing all layout with html tables. This new-fangled list/CSS frightens and confuses me. It was mostly because many of the infoboxes like this are created using tables and this was created by cut-and-paste programming. Tjoneslo 16:16, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I just made a revision to that list one. It's actualy a pretty good pick, I just realized that By bumping the parserfunctions back one, and adding another  you can make it so that even if you miss the first one or any of the other ones you will never ever have extra list elements or extra lines or whitespace. Dantman (Talk) 05:02, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Dantman added a nowiki tag to your comment because just adding  makes it disappear =/ i may use this info in the future --Cizagna (Talk) 07:26, 6 March 2007 (UTC)