Forum:Making Featured Article

I would like to add a "featured article" that changes periodically to the main page of physics. I'm not quite sure how to do this. I think it might have something to do with templates. Please help. Kjh4p 18:45, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It's theoretically easy, if you know something about templates.

Firstly, create the template which holds the featured article, like on WarWiki it's Template:Main Page/Featured article. To make things simpler, let's call our template Template:Featured article.

Ok, so here's the second step: take some text from the featured article. This is the text that's going to appear in the main page. It shouldn't contain generally more than one picture and it shouldn't be overly long.

This example blurb is from Wikipedia's article World War II (since WarWiki's text isn't that good yet):

"World War II (abbreviated WWII), or the Second World War, was a worldwide conflict fought between the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers, from 1939 until 1945. Armed forces from over seventy nations engaged in aerial, naval, and ground-based combat. Spanning much of the globe, World War II resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. The war ended with an Allied victory."

So, here's the text that you want in the main page. Insert it, with the appropriate wiki markup of course, to Template:Featured article. It's generally a good idea to include also a link in that template where your readers can read the full article. It could be the name of the article (in this case, World War II, the first words of that sentence) or a sentence at the end of the blurb reading "To read the complete article, please click here." or similiar.

Well, now that you have your text formatted and inserted into template:Featured article, save page so that your modifications will be saved.

Then go to the main page and enter in the place where you want the featured article go. This can be quite complicated, depending on how the main page is done.

I hope this helps you. Feel free to throw extra questions into my talk page. :) --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 20:34, 25 February 2007 (UTC)