Should we make a better power-table template system?

[WolfWings]

We don't seem to have a 'Village Pump' on the CoH wiki like on WikiPedia, so I'm posting this here for discussion before I dig in and upset folks.

For a'while the added 'dual set' tables I made helped, but most of the proliferated sets now have powers in different orders, or unique powers (especially for Stalkers versus other Melee sorts) so we're back to having 3+ full tables on many articles now, so there's screens and screens to scroll past (even at 1920x1200 on my gaming rig) before getting to the actual per-power details.

I'm suggesting a new power-table template that will result in markup on the wiki akin to the following:

Code: [Select]

{{Powers_Header|Brute|Scrapper|Tanker}}
...
{{Powers_Level|Icon=FieryFray_Incinerate.png|Power=Incinerate|BruteLevel=8|ScrapperLevel=26|TankerLevel=35|Effect=Melee, High DoT(Fire)}}
...
{{Powers_LevelRow|Icon=FieryFray_WillOWisp.png|Power=Taunt|BruteLevel=12|TankerLevel=10|ScrapperLevel=|Effect=Ranged (Targeted AoE), Foe Taunt, -Range|Border=1}}
...
{{Powers_Footer|Tanker|Brute|Scrapper}}
Note that ordering of tanker/brute/scrapper items make no difference, the template will do all the magic for that.

This would make a table that would be sortable by level for any given class, and would have the icons for each class on the appropriate columns.

The only reasons I haven't started writing this is: What should the 'default' ordering for tables be? And what order should the classes be in?

Fiery Melee is a good example with the power I specifically selected above w/ Incinerate versus Taunt ordering, for example? My thought is that everything (on page load for powers, left-to-right for classes) be shown sorted alphabetically by in-game name, since a single click will bubble up/down all the other entries appropriately.

[Aggelakis]

Archetypes in alphabetical order. Powers, I'm not sure. Maybe alphabetical as well, and then sortable by level accessible by each archetype.

[Sekoia]

I think merging and making them sortable is a good idea. Initially sorting both alphabetically seems the best solution, especially since that would match what is done in the Powers section of the page. Powers are sorted alphabetically there. The "Minimum Level" given for each power lists archetypes alphabetically as well.

A small note on crafting the templates: I suggest that you make the Powers_Header call {{Powers_Header|Brute=1|Scrapper=1|Tanker=1}} rather than using positional params, so that you can do an existence check on each rather than simply displaying them in the order listed. Otherwise, your table rows will be using magic to put them in the right order but the header will not be.

[WolfWings]

Sorry, yeah, was trying to imply moving away from positional variables as much as possible, and it was a typed-as-I-went suggestion. You're correct, the trailing =1's would be needed to make the template suggestions work correctly.

I'll begin crafting the templates, and for now I'm going to work on implementing it on the page I used as an example above, Fiery Melee.

For now I'm going to prefix the templates Powers_WolfWings and dupe the Fiery Melee page to a sandbox inside my userspace:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/User:WolfWings/Fiery_Melee

I stripped out the 'Historal' section onwards, so it's just power tables and individual power descriptions for now.