Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-34918040-20190808154111

Hi,

I'm an admin of the Asphalt Wiki, and as the game has many items (boxes) whose properties change all the time, I've introduced a kind of modular template system so we have the current values everywhere on the site.

Basically, the system consists of
 * first-level templates that are mere data containers,
 * a second-level metatemplate that routes the parameters to
 * third-level templates that are responsible for the actual look on the page.

You can see a detailed explanation on Help:Pro Kit Box modular system.

All this is combined with a statistics project (Asphalt Wiki:WikiProject Statistics) which means that the first-level templates also contain statistical data.

Some of our pages contain huge lists of boxes which means that there are three template calls per box. So far I was able to avoid pages being categorized as containing too many template calls, everything works fine, but:

What I did there was basically designing a database with wikitext. Therefore I'd like to ask:

Is it possible to call a database from within wikitext? This would result in
 * an external database somewhere outside or on a Fandom server
 * a reduction of template calls by 2/3
 * better maintenance as more users could edit the database. Currently, the whole thing is in a huge Excel sheet on my own computer which generates wikitext for box updates. The sheet is getting really slow.

Thanks for your ideas

Guy  