Forum:Automatic boilerplates

Forums: Index → Community help

Hello. How could I make a boilerplate and automatically assign it to a specific category. I'm trying to make a dictionary, with a boilerplate, or a template where you can click and replace "enter here your definition this way" by the real definition. If a boilerplate could be assigned automatically to a category, for instance "verbs", it would allow to get a pre-filled page. Should I use a script or an extension to make that? Thank you. --PERCE-NEIGE (talk) 13:15, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, you want to display information in a fixed layout that allows people to edit the information in specific fields without editing the entire page or sections using the text editor. Interactive form content needs either an extension or JavaScript (or both), since there's no way to create forms using wiki markup alone. Much of the layout could be accomplished with templates. Be aware that any article that can be edited with JavaScript (through the write API) can also be edited with the text editor. Articles are assigned to categories when the most recent edit to that article is processed. I'd suggest starting with JavaScript, which runs in the visitor's browser. PHP runs on the server and typically accesses the database directly to generate pages and to store information. It would need to be thoroughly tested before staff would even consider installing it. --Saftzie (talk) 19:08, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Saftzie's advice is solid.

For a PHP solution, maybe the Form extension could do the trick? (Full disclaimer: While I've contributed a bit to the extension back in late 2017, it has not been tested on ShoutWiki and it certainly is an old extension—over a decade, in fact!—that is essentially somewhat bare-bones in what it supports.) --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 16:47, 18 November 2019 (UTC)