best_practices

If {{NAMESPACE}} do nothing, otherwise...

📅 Jan 23, 2024 · ☕ 9 min read · ✍️ River

#best_practices · #mediawiki

A common design pattern in MediaWiki templating is to write {{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||}}

Ordering a Cargo field

📅 Dec 3, 2023 · ☕ 7 min read · ✍️ River

#cargo · #best_practices

How can you enforce a sorting order on a Cargo field when displaying tabular data?

I don't like infoboxes - EMWCon 2023

📅 Jun 6, 2023 · ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ River

#talk · #best_practices · #mediawiki

I attended EMWCon 2023 remotely again in 2023 and finally gave the presentation everyone has been waiting for: I don't like infoboxes.

List-type fields, for realsies

📅 May 20, 2023 · ☕ 12 min read · ✍️ River

#cargo · #best_practices

What are list-type fields? What *aren't* they? How do I query them?

Handling internal data in MediaWiki

📅 Apr 12, 2022 · ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ River

#talk · #emwcon · #best_practices

My EMWCon 2022 talk

Make lots of sandbox pages

📅 Dec 7, 2021 · ☕ 5 min read · ✍️ River

#best_practices · #mediawiki

Instead of putting all of your code experiments on a single page, make lots of little sandbox pages!

I stored a boolean instead of a timestamp

📅 Oct 5, 2021 · ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ River

#cargo · #best_practices

A Cargo field I was going to store as a timestamp but decided to store as a boolean instead

Comment your closing braces

📅 Jun 1, 2021 · ☕ 6 min read · ✍️ River

#best_practices · #mediawiki

This one trick will save you 80% of your wikitext debugging time!

How to rename Cargo tables safely

📅 Aug 11, 2020 · ☕ 8 min read · ✍️ River

#caching · #cargo · #leaguepedia · #best_practices

Cargo actually provides a way to cleanly rename tables without any "downtime," but it's not obvious or documented how to do this.

Bot passwords & you (& your bot (& you))

📅 Jul 28, 2020 · ☕ 8 min read · ✍️ River

#mediawiki · #best_practices

What's a bot password? What's the difference between bot accounts and bot passwords? Why do I need all this anyway?

Don't use _pageName

📅 Jul 14, 2020 · ☕ 10 min read · ✍️ River

#cargo · #best_practices

Sometimes it can seem convenient to use the built-in _pageName field that Cargo provides; however, _pageName is a metadata field, and you should take care to use it only as such.