best_practices on River Writes - A MediaWiki Blog

The Tag That Shall Not Be Named

river — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 01:31:04 +0000

A quick post about transclusion, partial transclusion, The Tag That Shall Not Be Named, and whitespace

Please use recentchanges

river — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 02:05:16 +0000

The page MediaWiki:Sidebar is powered by other interface messages, use them!

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

river — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:34:28 +0000

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

Ordering a Cargo field

river — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 18:02:20 +0000

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

I don't like infoboxes - EMWCon 2023

river — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:02:30 +0000

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

river — Sat, 20 May 2023 23:06:27 +0000

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

Handling internal data in MediaWiki

river — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 05:27:42 +0000

My EMWCon 2022 talk

Make lots of sandbox pages

river — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 23:41:34 +0000

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

river — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 01:16:32 +0000

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

Comment your closing braces

river — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:22:52 +0000

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

How to rename Cargo tables safely

river — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 01:08:14 +0000

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))

river — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:43:18 +0000

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

river — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:05:06 +0000

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.