User:Willscrlt/meta

• meta • meta • meta • meta • meta •

I am gaining experience in writing "meta" templates designed to work across all the Wikimedia Foundation sites and that can be customized to work in any language. This page contains links to all of my meta templates currently installed at this site. My current meta templates are mostly of interest only to me, but the templating techniques I use could be useful to many people. Please feel free to look at my work and ask me questions, but please do not change anything. All my templates are released under several free licenses, so you are welcome to copy them and then modify the copies as long as you give me credit for my original work.

My templates

1. /cat — Category list specific to this project and language
   • Version: 1.2.0 (06:16, 12 February 2010 (UTC)) — Current version
2. /CatNoteIfEmpty — A notice for empty or sparsely populated categories to be filled automatically by template
3. /iw — Default interwikis
4. /lang — Language marker for blocks of internationalized text
   • Version: 1.7.1 (10:44, 25 September 2009 (UTC)) — Current version
   •  English: This is an example.
5. /Multilingual user page — A user home page translated into many languages with Babel info and a rudimentary sidebar
   • Version: 2.4.0 — Current version
6. /Sign — Displays my signature, dynamically adapting to different wikis and languages
   • Version: —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | com | b:en ) — Current version
   • Example: —Willscrlt ( “Talk” • “w:en” • “c” )
7. Talk Page Headers:
   1. RTL-safe : works with any language, but originally designed for Arabic (RTL) wikis
      • Version: 2.1.0 — Current version

My userboxes

I have made several userboxes for the English Wikipedia. It can be difficult to make them work on other sites. In some cases it is because the standard {{Userbox}}, {{Userbox-r}}, and {{Userbox-2}} templates are not available at every project or in every language (sometimes they are present, but translated into a different name). Another case is where the template exists, but it is implemented differently or using different styles and formatting. Any such differences could cause a userbox to not display or display poorly. I have created three standard userbox templates (my standard, but based on the templates in use at the English Wikipedia at the time I forked these to my userspace).

I continue to modify the templates as needed to better support non-English languages. One big difference from other Userbox templates I've seen is that these support specifying the language of the text, the text-flow direction (LTR or RTL), text-alignment, and floating either to the left of the right. That makes these templates very useful on non-English language sites. Read the template documentation for more information.

For more userboxes (ones that actually say something), visit my my master gallery of userboxes on the English Wikipedia.

Userbox
The main template that displays the userbox.

id

info

Use: {{User:Willscrlt/meta/Userbox}}

Userbox-r
A wrapper that results in a userbox with the ID field on the reverse side.

info

id

Use: {{User:Willscrlt/meta/Userbox-r}}

Userbox-2
A wrapper that triggers a userbox with two ID areas.

id1

info

id2

Use: {{User:Willscrlt/meta/Userbox-2}}

Internationalized materials

In addition to templates, I also occasionally create translations of some documents. My master repository of internationalized material (other than templates) is located on Wikimedia Commons.

—meta v2.1.0 by Willscrlt