I think that the best way to document the infoboxes is assume that readers have no knowledge of technical jargon such as CSS, XML, Attributes and parameters.
The official help page is deliberately brief because it would be too complicated to explain all of that, although it should expect one to at least have knowledge of Templates.
I'll show the Best practices page to our infobox team. Maybe we can make that page the official source for best practices. A blog post is a good idea, too, since that tends to be seen by more people and just those who actively go looking for the information.
(And I love the idea about some guidelines when an infobox does and does not make sense)
We might need to document these limitations for VE and Infoboxes because currently it can be confusing for someone who doesn't really understand them especially newbies and first timers. An issue is that we don't really know how long it takes to refresh the dialog and add a new infobox to the dialog. Also, are there any plans to add the insertion dialog to the RichText editor?
Anyway, even with all current limitations, I've actually added a lot of infoboxes to more than 10 pages and the insertion dialog made it extremely easy to add the content. It needs a couple of tweaks but it is a step in the right direction.
Some of the limitations with infoboxes on VE are not intended and are being fixed right now. So I'd not document them just yet - these issues may not be issues anymore in just a week or two.
There probably won't be an integration dialogue for infoboxes in RichText editor, because we're not currently updating that one.
Any chance input and output get separated? Especially with range-type data: min level - max level. You want 2 input fields cause you want to be able to query different ranges that may intersect or overlap. but for formatting you want 10 - 20 with 1 label, not two.
I'm not sure if I understand your post. If you're suggesting a new feature, use Board:Portability_Development_and_Suggestions or create a new thread one of the other boards. This thread is mainly about documentation.
Update on the visual editor and portable infobox issue: That might not get fixed right now after all. Instead, we're waiting for a general editor overhaul that should fix this issue along with a bunch of others - but it will take longer.
So maybe it's not such a bad idea after all to document the VE's various problems with regards to infoboxes. :/
Going back to the original topic. Based on some comments in the Thread:918639#80 it seems that neither the Help:Infobox page nor our Portable Infobox page is really good enough for novices.
I think we should just assume that they don't know anything about infoboxes and create a sort of tutorial or guide for the absolute basics of it. I mean, the infobox tags can be confusing especially the fact that some of them don't allow normal wikitext, e.g.:
<infobox> <data>This is my data</data> </infobox>
A novice would probably expect that to work, but sadly it won't, and it doesn't make sense considering the code below would work:
<table> <tr><td>bababa</td> </table>
I particularly like how the visual editor user guide(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:VisualEditor/User_guide) doesn't make any assumptions despite being more user-friendly than our infoboxes, perhaps we could use a similar approach to a http://portability.fandom.com/wiki/Infobox/Basics page.
So any thoughts?
I agree. I found that many communities who are generally on board with the idea of migrating their infoboxes get stuck at the point where they have to review the markup the migration tool gives them. We don't give particularly good information on what the different parts of the markup mean, and how to use and manipulate them.
I think a page that explains the markup for beginners might be very useful.
<infobox>
<data>
<label>Gold</label>
<default>{{#invoke:parser|main|1|valuetoparse|parsestring}}</default>
</data>
<data>
<label>Experience</label>
<default>{{#invoke:parser|main|2|valuetoparse|parsestring}} </default>
</data>
</infobox>
You could also use use to return the parameters :
{{infobox
|WhatDoIReferHere={{#invoke:parser|main|1|valuetoparse|parsestring}}
|WhatDoIReferHere2={{#invoke:parser|main|2|valuetoparse|parsestring}}
}}
Or even simply create a module to return those two values automatically. Although lua's regex is not the same as javascript's regex.
Even that ?? to me I can do the table, just not the coding
Even that ?? to me I can do the table, just not the coding
I don't quite understand what you mean. Can you explain in more detail?
Even that ?? to me I can do the table, just not the coding
I can try [[1]] I found a member to help fix it. I set the table just not the coding with in #writerproblems
#(_)? coffee image show a coffee cup, need more to answer and #InvisibleDisabilities