Help:Lua

Lua is available as a templating language on Wikia, helping to provide users with the ability to create more maintainable templates, and to improve the performance of some of our slowest pages.

Lua is a different coding experience to basic wikitext templates, resembling a more 'traditional' programming syntax. It offer two key advantages: first and foremost is that logical functionality – 'if', 'else', and 'while' statements along with arrays and variable definition, for instance - is built in to the Lua language, making the implementation of basic logic much easier in Lua than via MediaWiki's other methods. Secondly, because Lua is streamlined for logical operations, it is much more technically efficient.

Enabling and support
Lua can be enabled upon administrator request. When enabled, the general standard Lua libraries along with the specialized Scribunto libraries will be available. Additionally, InfoboxBuilder will be automatically bundled in the installation.

For more background on the tool read our introduction to Lua and introduction to InfoboxBuilder

Documentation and help
Lua documentation on the Wikia Developers community:
 * Converting wikitext templates
 * InfoboxBuilder, an in-house Wikia tool for building infoboxes.
 * Reference manual, a comprehensive documentation page of Lua code
 * Scribunto libraries
 * Standard Lua libraries
 * More help pages

In addition to this documentation, we have a forum board set up here to ask questions and get help.