Help:Designing infoboxes

You are well-advised to seek the opinions of other editors before embarking on a design of a new infobox or redesign of an existing one. If your ideas are welcomed, consider prototyping your new design. Once prototyped, propose the infobox changes to the appropriate WikiProject and gain TechInfoDepot:Consensus before deploying your new design.

Creating a new infobox
You should research whether an existing infobox fits your purpose either by examining those in Category:Infobox templates or researching articles that might be candidates to receive the new infobox. You should prototype the proposed infobox in your own userspace first and research which TechInfoDepot:WikiProjects might be interested in the infobox.

Prototyped infoboxes should be placed on the TechInfoDepot:List of infoboxes/Proposed sub-page when proposed and added to the appropriate sub-category when implemented.

Prototyping an infobox
Infoboxes can be readily prototyped within the designing editor's own user space. For example, to create an infobox prototype called, a designing editor should simply start a standalone article from his or her user page:  Special:Mypage/Infobox mysubject. The general steps in prototyping are:


 * Determining the general implementation approach
 * Designing the infobox
 * Implementing the infobox
 * Documenting, for other editors, how to use the infobox
 * Categorizing the infobox to make it more easily available to other editors
 * Testing the infobox implementation

Determining the general approach
There are three techniques with which to construct a prototype:


 * 1) Use infobox to construct the prototype. This method is the easiest and hence strongly recommended.  The rest of this section assumes the designing editor chooses this approach.
 * 2) Use a table to construct a "static infobox", converting to a template after the editor arrives at a "final" design. See also TechInfoDepot:Thinking outside the infobox.
 * 3) Use the MediaWiki template feature to construct the prototype using the documentation at mw:Help:Templates. While this provides the most flexibility, it is by far the most challenging approach (and is beyond the scope of this article)

Designing
Editors generally compose infoboxes from four types of visual elements: A title, images, sections, and fields. Since these terms are not standard, we illustrate them here:

The selection and arrangement of fields is an important design decision for which TechInfoDepot:Manual of Style (infoboxes) gives some general advice. The part of a field that varies from article to article becomes a parameter for the newly prototyped infobox and must be consistently expressed in two distinct places:


 * 1) In the infobox implementation itself, to indicate where the article-specific text is to be displayed
 * 2) In the infobox documentation, to indicate which article-specific information editors are to provide when using the infobox

Additionally, the editor should decide whether a field (and hence its corresponding parameter) is required or optional. The difference between the two is that a required field is always displayed; an optional field is not displayed where articles referencing the infobox omit the parameter. If the field is required, the infobox designer should consider whether a default value for the field is useful.

Implementing
Once an editor has decided upon the title, image, and arrangement of sections and fields, he or she is ready to map those visual elements onto the parameters of the infobox template. infobox documents how to use this template. While there are many different infobox parameters, the most frequently used are:

The mapping of visual elements onto infobox parameters is straightforward:

When making style decisions, editors should follow the TechInfoDepot:Manual of Style (infoboxes) as closely as possible. Images must be specified using the TechInfoDepot:Extended image syntax. When specifying styles (e.g., for,  , and  ), http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/propidx.html is an excellent reference.

The vast majority of editors use only the simple features of infobox in the ways described above. However, the more intrepid editor should be aware of the more esoteric features of infobox:


 * Displaying the title outside the infobox (as opposed to inside the infobox)
 * Displaying extra text below the title or at the bottom of the infobox (for "see also", footnotes, wikilink to "list of" article, etc.)
 * Displaying a second image
 * Displaying images anywhere other than the top of the infobox
 * Mapping individual fields onto an appropriate microformat (See also TechInfoDepot:WikiProject Microformats)
 * Displaying the "view/edit/discuss" navigation bar for the infobox

Again, these features are documented in infobox.

Documenting
The goal of documenting the newly created infobox is to allow other editors to quickly ascertain what information they need to provide when incorporating the infobox into articles. The convention is to keep documentation in a page separate from the infobox implementation and arrange for the implementation to transclude the documentation when the infobox is displayed directly, but not when the infobox is displayed in an article.


 * First, ensure Documentation is appended to the template, enclosed in  elements.(See also below)  Ensure there are no stray spaces between the end of template  and   as these, if present, will be transcluded into every article that uses the template.


 * Next, create the documentation page as a subpage from the infobox template itself (e.g., Special:Mypage/Infobox mysubject/doc). The easiest way to do this is by following the  link from the empty documentation transclusion. This will preload a skeleton documentation page which can be filled in with basic usage, links to similar templates,  interwiki links, and category links (at the bottom, in the   section).


 * Finally, organize the documentation into the following sections:
 * Overview
 * Parameters (their meanings and whether they are optional, have a default value, or are conditionally displayed)
 * Blank template (suitable for copy-n-pasting into articles)
 * Examples (e.g., to show the effects of conditionally displayed parameters)
 * Microformats (if used)

Categorizing
In order for other editors to find an infobox more easily, categories and interwiki links should be added to the bottom of the infobox documentation (at Special:Mypage/Infobox mysubject/doc).

Note that by convention, the infobox should be categorized using an explicit sort key that drops the infobox prefix. In other words, rather than letting the category sort key default to TechInfoDepot:PAGENAME (in our example, " "), editors should explicitly supply " " as the category sort key, as in.

Testing
Editors should test prototyped infoboxes in their own userspaces. The simplest means is for the editor to place the fully qualified page name of the template to be tested within the template braces (e.g., ) on his or her own user page, Special:Mypage.

Once the infobox prototype has been tested, it is ready for peer review and deployment.

A skeleton infobox
The following can be used as a starting point for a new infobox; simply copy-n-paste into the page designated to hold the new infobox and add or delete parameters as needed. Editors who want to take advantage of the more advanced features of infobox can copy-n-paste the comprehensive skeleton from infobox.

Example infobox-based infoboxes

 * infobox cheese
 * Infobox company
 * infobox Ecumenical council
 * infobox fictional race
 * infobox handball league
 * infobox holiday
 * infobox storage medium