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 is, as of fall 2014, enabled by default across Wikia. When enabled, the general standard Lua libraries along with the specialized Scribunto libraries are also 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.

See also

• Lua on Wikipedia
• Lua modules on Wikipedia
• Lua-based templates on Wikipedia
• Scribunto extension page

Further help and feedback

• Browse and search other help pages at Help:Contents
• Check Fandom Community Central for sources of further help and support
• Check Contacting Fandom for how to report any errors or unclear steps in this article