User:BoxDroppingManApe/infobox tutorial

Disclaimers
First off before I forget, here's a note: I generally don't use the wikia visual editor because I hate it. I work with the source editor or the rich text editor most of the time. As I understand it, editing what's in an infobox is a bit easier in the Visual Editor - just double-click on the infobox, and it should bring up all the possible fields you can put stuff into. Your milage may vary, though, and the Visual Editor has always been a bit too fiddly with infoboxes for my taste. If you run into a situation where visual editor isn't behaving the way you would expect, you might have to just do it by hand in one of the other editors.

Second off, I'm not super great at explaining shit, so most of this article might be useless or obtuse. Feel free to ask for clarification.

How templates in general work
Okie, so when I'm not being lazy I try to attach some basic documentation to the templates, as seen here and here. I haven't attached full documentation to the character template yet, because I'm still tweaking it a little.

When you invoke a template, you have to do start by opening with two curly braces and the name of the template, like this: {{Infobox episode|

With infoboxes, all the fields are named, so you follow that template invocation with things like "name=Magic Brian" and you separate all fields with pipe characters "|". Wikia ignores white space when using templates, so you can feel free to put the pipe characters on new lines and add as many spaces as you want for extra readability, like I have been doing with the episodes. That's not necessary, though, so if you want to make it compact you could write it like this (episode 2 infobox used as example):

{{infobox episode|story=One|number=Two|youtubeid=jwDlhEhXAjo|mp3link=http://www.maximumfun.org/adventure-zone/ep-2-here-there-be-gerblins-chapter-two|airdate=December 4th, 2014|length=1:07:27|previous=Ep. 1: Here There Be Gerblins - Chapter One|next=Ep. 3: Here There Be Gerblins - Chapter Three}}

So in short, it doesn't matter how many spaces or line breaks you put into an infobox template; don't worry about that.

Specific to the episode infobox
As I mentioned earlier, infoboxes are generally custom built for a specific purpose, which means that it won't respond if you try to add additional fields that aren't already preset in there. Like what's posted on the documentation page. here's a list of the available fields I put in the episode infobox. I'll put an asterisk next to special fields that require a little extra explanation.

Most of the fields are self explanatory. You type something in, and it appears in the infobox with a label next to it that I preset. Some of them, like the players field, have default values that I have set up to show up if nothing is entered into the field. Otherwise, in the case of things like airdate, it just won't show up if you don't put anything in it. In these fields, you can generally put just about anything you want into it, and they can be as long or short as you would like (I like to put a tag between separate lines, but I'm not sure if that's necessary. I think it might blow up if you try to stick another infobox into a field, and there's a few other exceptions (for example, infoboxes don't like it if you put a reference tag in them) but those are edge cases that generally won't come up unless you're trying to do something really specific to the infobox, in which case you're better off just editing the infobox directly.

Story and number are a little different. They're set up to show up in the same part of the infobox together, with some pre-formatted text around them. The text "Story" will always appear before whatever you put in the story field, and "Chapter" will always appear before the number field. I threw a comma in there to separate them that always appears with "Chapter", but I'm not super happy with that so I might change that down the line. However, you can put whatever you want into either field.

The one bit of information you specifically asked for
You mentioned having trouble with the image field. The way the image field works is you put the file name of the image into the field, with no brackets or anything. It's case sensitive and everything, so try to be as exact as possible. The image field only works with files that have been uploaded to the wiki, so it won't work with external links. It'll automatically resize the image to the same width as the infobox. There's ways to tweak that, but I don't have much experience with that so I'd need to do some research. Right now, there's no way to give an infobox image a caption or turn it into a link. I'd have to tinker with the infobox if that's something you wanted.

There's actually a way to include multiple images in one infobox. You can see an example of it on Rachel Rosing's MBMBAM page. I can go over it if you want.

I included an "imgcredit" field to give credit to whoever made the image, since the infobox doesn't have a caption. The way it works is... complicated, and held together with scotch tape. Put some text in that field giving the artist credit, and it'll show up as a reference on the bottom of the page, as long as there is a tag at the bottom of the page.

More inside baseball
Mp3link is pretty straightforward. Just put the html address of wherever someone can listen, and the infobox will create a link to it. If you don't put anything, it'll just include a generic link to the maximum fun page.

Youtubeid is a little complicated. You include a video's youtube id to get it to play in the infobox. You can find a video's youtube id within its html link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= EXpoAZkT3gg

The character infobox
As I mentioned earlier, the character infobox is still a work in progress, so all this is subject to change. Here's a breakdown of its current fields:

There's no real tricks to any of the fields besides the image field, which I talked about already. It's notable only because there are a lot of fields, and they're grouped together in ways you'll see when you use it - ways that hopefully make sense. The infobox is set to collapse some of those groups, so that the infobox won't automatically stretch out to the bottom of the page with info. That's not something you can control without editing the infobox template directly.

In conclusion
So, as I mentioned earlier, feel free to ask any questions, or let me know if you're trying to make an infobox do something that isn't working. Most of this knowledge came from google searching and testing templates for the last half year, so it's probably a fucking mess. Hopefully there's something helpful in here.