Can wiki stubs and pages be made to work in character/item descriptions?

DMaple
DMaple
edited August 2007 in Feature Requests

Comments

  • DMaple
    DMaple
    Posts: 63
    I'd like to be able to refer to other wiki stubs and pages in character backgrounds using the normal [[:text]] or [[text]] format is there a reason this isn't possible at the moment? Is it an oversight or because of the way NPCs get shared, so the references wouldn't work for different users?
  • Micah
    Micah
    Posts: 894
    It's an oversight, but also a design flaw. When I designed the wiki-linking, I was careful to associate the wiki and blog. In fact, the blog entries are just special wiki pages. I never really thought about the inter-character relationships that also would be nice to show.

    So, the characters are quite separate from the wiki/blog portion of the system, and it would be fairly difficult to connect them. I hate to be a buzzkill, but it's not something that will happen anytime soon.

    That's not to say that it's not a good idea, though. Seeing how useful it would be, I kick myself for not planning for it from the beginning.

    Summary: I want it too, but it's not going to happen any time soon.

    Keep the requests coming!
  • DMaple
    DMaple
    Posts: 63
    That's fine as you can still add them as a weblink.
  • wyrmul
    wyrmul
    Posts: 36
    While I can understand the difficulty of creating this functionality it is definitely in the top 3 of most desirable features. I am wondering how the two different systems (wiki/log vs item/character) differ. Are you using a pre-existing system for the item/character half or one you are writing yourself? If the functionality exists on the wiki/log to test if a page exists from an external place would it be possible to add to the text parsing of the item/character page a function that tests the existence of a page in the wiki/log half then add a weblink that points to the appropriate page. It would be kinda cludgy but would be a first step that would automate the process of adding them as weblink.

    Of course this requires the testing function to exist in the wiki/log sides api. Also since I cannot see the code I could be completely misrepresenting the possibly of this capability.
  • Micah
    Micah
    Posts: 894
    bq. Also since I cannot see the code I could be completely misrepresenting the possibly of this capability.

    It's nice to hear this rather than "It should be super-easy!"

    The main issue is that the wiki/blogs are per-campaign, while the characters are independent of campaigns (in most ways). This is partly due to the fact that the original plan was to make this site a big database for pre-made characters, items, spells, monsters, and such. However, people quickly latched onto the campaign blogging stuff, so we ran with that, and it's been a good fit.

    Anyways, since the ties to a campaign are very loose (and sometimes not there), it's non-trivial to determine where a particular wiki page link should go to. So, using the standard [[link-here]] syntax, it's not easy (and sometimes impossible) to find which wiki should be checked for that particular page.

    However, since the characters and items are guaranteed unique (ie. there's only one "retread"), we did finally enable linking between them. For example, you can link to Retread from any other character by placing [[:retread]] in one of the Textile fields (Bio or Description). The same goes for Items.

    So, we're halfway there. You can link character-to-character, but not character-to-wiki. Still, it is possible (if a pain) by using regular links (either with HTML or Textile).
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