Scratchpad:Wikia tour/Creation and improvement

(There is an archived Central Wikia forum for news about a proposed new multimedia tour of Central Wikia, but its last edit by a human was in 2008; superseded by later developments, apparently.)

Introduction
The Wikia tour system uses a copy of the template at Template:Wikia tour, which provides an introductory panel then transcludes copies of selected pages of your wiki.

To create your Wikia tour then link it in, please follow these instructions. (Some of these links are red on purpose. This page is designed so that everything below this paragraph will work when the whole page is pasted into your Wikia. The word "Project" should be left alone but it should automatically redirect to your wiki's equivalent namespace.)

To set up, you may just use your sandbox, but (in case a user wants to insert new pages later) it is much better to make a purpose-built page (before copying anything from here) called Project:Wikia tour creation and improvement.

Copy this Wikia Central page then work on your copy

 * 1) Copy this whole page and paste it into your wiki's sandbox or the purpose-built page suggested above.
 * 2) Save it and work from it, preferably keeping it in a separate window. Its links will point to the right places, either on Community Central, for things you need to copy, or to existing or future pages on your Wikia.

Create basic structure

 * 1) Copy our wikia:Category:Wikia tour to your new Category:Wikia tour.
 * 2) Copy our wikia:Template:Wikia tour to your new Template:Wikia tour.
 * 3) Copy our wikia:Project:Wikia tour to your new Project:Wikia tour. You can edit it to describe your own wiki. Everything above the "div" line should be removed. The second bulleted link ("Go to the next Wikia..."), should include the word "Scratchpad". (Before December 2008 it said "Wikia".)
 * 4) Copy our wikia:Project:Wikia tour/End to your new Project:Wikia tour/End. In its second bulleted link, check that the pointer is to "Scratchpad", not to "Wikia", as discussed just above at Project:Wikia tour. (''That's so that tourists may easily go on or back to the first participating mini-tour — on Scratchpad.

Main Page creation
Your first substantive page (found from "Start our mini-tour" on Project:Wikia tour) should be Project:Wikia tour/Main Page. First paste in the following:

Main Page editing
Then you may edit the various fields of this template you just pasted in. The "namespace" and "page" refer to the namespace and pagename of the page this tour stop is displaying. For the Main Page, this is usually blank for the "namespace" (because the "main" namespace has no prefix) and "Main Page" for the "page".

The "next" variable is the exact full page name of the next stop in your tour. This does not have to be "about us". Change it to almost anything you like. For example, you may want a featured article there, so you could change it to "Featured". (For an ultra-short mini-tour, make "next=End"!! But you'd better add some substantive pages before linking to the main tour.)

The "commentary" is a description of the current stop. It can have links, paragraphs, and images, BUT NOT TEMPLATES. For the main page, you can probably customize it a little, saying what is distinctive about your main page.

Now more pages, one at a time
Click on the "continue tour" link and paste .

Replace the stars with the correct variables (using the guidelines for "Main Page editing" above). (Namespaces other than "main" can be used, but "Category" will not display any of the category's content at present. Another nuisance is that any page that uses "PAGENAME" or similar "magic words" will not function properly, though it may look good enough superficially; see example.)

Keep doing this until you reach the end of the tour. No need to do them all now; insertion of other pages later is fairly easy; several of our tours started with only the Main Page and one or two others.

Last one for now
You should use "next=End" on the last new tour page.

Your internal tour should now work, with the top link leading back to Project:Wikia tour. Try it. Then link to Project:Wikia tour from your main page, your Community Portal, and wherever else you like (even from other sites).

(We recommend you set up a working mini-tour of your wiki before thinking of joining the list.)

Inserting new pages later
To insert another page, edit the one before it so as to change the "next=". Save that, then click on the "Continue ..." link, and create the new tour page(s) in the same way as described under "Now more pages, one at a time" above, with the last new one restoring the correct name for "next=".

Join the main tour

 * 1) Now, to link in so that Wikia tourists can be led easily to yours after touring other Wikia, go to the list of wikis in this tour.
 * 2) Add your wiki at the end.
 * 3) Go to the Tour page of the one that appears just before yours: View both their first page - project:Wikia tour - and their last page - project:Wikia tour/End  - and change the "Go to the next Wikia..." links there to point to your own tour instead of to Wikia Central or Scratchpad. That should involve just changing the part of the URL between the // and the ".wikia.com". (They may have the link only on their "end" page.)

Take the full tour to check that nobody has broken the chain. (There were three breaks after the thirteenth Wikia was added!)

When someone else makes a new tour, they will link to it from yours (editing one or two of your pages) if they get the procedure right. You can help them if they don't manage it.