User:Symon/blog/New Award Templates

One of the things people love putting on their populace pages are their awards. There's a section specifically for them, and people are justifiably proud of the recognitions they've received. While your populace page may not be a place to recreate the OP (there's a link for that so you don't have to), it is great to see the visual representations of a person's awards.

Generally speaking, these awards are added using a template tag (see the previous entry on templates), so as to make them easy to add, and easy to connect updates to everyone who has the award. A list of the awards that you can add to your page is available at Help:Awards Templates List.

Now you may notice that while the Kingdom awards are well represented, not every baronial award is available. Some local groups have their awards there, and some do not. You may be asking 'How do I get -my- baronial awards listed, so that those who have received them can add them to their pages?'. Here's how.

• First, upload an image of the award. Try to keep it small, as these awards are displayed as small icons. Whatever you do upload will be scaled down to 50px, so you'll want to make sure it looks good at that size. Uploading can be done at Special:Upload.

• Once the image is uploaded, it is time to create a new template page for it. What's the name of the award? You'll want the Template name to reflect that in some form. Look at Help:Awards Templates List again to see the examples. Generally it's best to go with {{Branch_Award}}. Start a new blank template page by going to https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/index.php?title=Template:Branch_Award in your browser.

• You'll be told the page doesn't exist and asked if you'd like to create it by entering some content. Rather than selecting some boilerplate from the boilerplate menu, enter the following wiki markup:

[[Image:Filename of the image you uploaded|50px|Text that appears when someone hovers over the image - typically the award name|link=name of the page or page section you'd like the award to link to]]

So, using Template:Bhakail_Salamander as an example, that award looks like

[[Image:Bhakail_Salamander.png|50px|Order of the Salamander|link=Bhakail#Awards]]

• Save your award template, and then go add it to the list of awards available at Help:Awards Templates List so others may find it and use it!

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Oh, and one more bit of wiki magic you can sprinkle in.... Because The award is a template and the contents are automatically included in the populace page when it is added, you can also combine the above template code with a little bit of Category magic (see the previous entry on categories) to make a category that automatically collects the names of everyone who has added the award to their page. Add the category tag to the template and it'll automatically be added to the page of anyone who brings in the template. See Template:Carolingia_Perseus for an example of that, and the resulting Category:Carolingia_Perseus for an example. Please note that there is an advanced function here to keep from including the Awards Template List in your Category.