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. Infoboxes are generally made using templates, to create consistency across a community.

Wikia is currently developing a new way to code infoboxes to help them display well across devices, detailed below. For more background information on this new type of infobox code, see this thread.

A tool to aid infobox migration is currently being tested - more information about this can be found here: Help:InfoboxMigration.

How to use an infobox
You can add an infobox to an article the same way as you would any other template - either via the editor's built-in template tools, or through the editor's source mode. In the latter case, you would generally start by copying the syntax from the template's documentation (normally found towards the bottom of the template's page) and pasting it into an article, changing the words after the equals signs to provide the desired information. For example:

Creating new infoboxes


First, start new template with any name you like - Template:ExampleInfobox, for example. We'll begin with a basic infobox, with a title and an image:

This wikitext will tell your template to use name and image variables for title and image elements. Additionally you can provide the default tag, whose value will be used when a user does not specify a name/image/etc. on the article.

Now we just need two more fields containing additional information, so let's add one:

After adding one last field with source set to first and label to First seen, we end up with the following:

We can now use the template in an article and get a working infobox:

Styling and display
Infoboxes using this kind of code are automatically styled, using your community's theme. If any of the variables are empty, the relevant row of the template will not be displayed (unless the 'default' tag has been used).

Layout options
Two alternative layout options are available for infoboxes:

...
 * default layout - &lt;data> tag labels displayed above the value

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 * tabular layout - &lt;data> tag labels displayed on the left side of the value

Custom theming
Default infobox theming can be overwritten using either theme or theme-source attributes of the infobox tag, allowing infoboxes to be styled via local community CSS.

If both attributes are used inside the infobox tag, the theme attribute is treated as the default.
 * The theme attribute is used to specify a custom CSS class for the infobox.
 * The theme-source attribute allows you to vary the CSS class via a template parameter.

Theme
For example, theme="delta" will add a class called portable-infobox-theme-delta to the infobox HTML, which can then be customized using CSS:

Theme-source
For example, theme-source="location" means that, when location is specified in an article's infobox, it will use the value of it as the class.

For example:  ...

The CSS to theme the template will thus be:

If you want to target specific elements within that infobox, you would do then something like this:

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 the infobox shown on the right.

Multiple ordering options for simple tags
There are three data fields, then title and image fields. As you can see, the title field does not have to be the first field, though you can only use it once per infobox.

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

Details



Alternative layout for group tags
Group tags can have an alternative horizontal layout where all the content is displayed next to each other in single horizontal line. This can be achieved by adding layout="horizontal" attribute to the group tag.

...

Force all group elements to be displayed
Using show="incomplete", you can force all group elements to be displayed, even when empty - unless all are empty, then the group is not rendered at all.

 Combatants Details  Combatants

Now we can use it in an article, and the work is done:

Field formatting
If you want to prepend or append some additional information to your data - like adding some icons, categories - or to process the passed values, the field formatting allows you to do that.


 * When the tag format is specified for node, the variable provided in source= is then formatted/modified as specified inside the format tag.
 * If the variable provided in source= is empty, the node renders values provided in default tags (or doesn't render if default tags are not specified).

A few sample use cases:
 * Extra text -
 * Links -
 * Categories -

Here, we add an icon:

The effect shown to the right can be achieved with the following syntax: Price to buy

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

Examples

 * Kratos ( source )
 * Beatrix Kiddo ( source )
 * Battle of Arrakeen ( source )