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2024-03-02: The wiki ran out of disk space, so things were not working. This has been resolved by adding another 5GB of quota ;-) Thanks to Tim Lindner for reporting the issues. 2020-05-17: If a page gives you an error about some revision not being found, just EDIT the page and the old page should appear in the editor. If it does, just SAVE that and the page should be restored. OS-9 Al (talk) 12:22, 17 May 2020 (CDT)

InfoBox Templates

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Looking for CoCo help? If you are trying to do something with your old Color Computer, read this quick reference. Want to contribute to this wiki? Be sure to read this first. This CoCo wiki project was started on October 29, 2004. --OS-9 Al

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Home / Help - InfoBox Templates


Sample InfoBox

Name Sample InfoBox
Date January 5
Year 1986
Notes Self centering (switchable), two buttons.
Info Source 1986 Radio Shack catalog
Tags TAGS NEEDED
About the Info Box

This page will link to the various InfoBox templates available in this wiki, and explain how to use them.

There will be a top-level InfoBox for each major section of this site:

  • Company
  • Convention
  • Hardware
  • People
  • Publication
  • Software

To make things easier, we can create sub-InfoBoxes that fill out common details. For example, InfoBoxPublication will add the category tag of "Publication", but we can create "InfoBoxMagazine" which will be the same box, but include the category tag of "Magazine" so the user does not have to.

There are only a few InfoBoxes right now, and they are not in the new format yet. Click on a template link to view the usage help:

InfoBox Fields

Here is where we will figure out the various fields each InfoBox needs to have.

Each InfoBox will display a few useful fields specific to that section. For example, the Publication InfoBox might have a "start year" and "end year", but a Software InfoBox might only have a "release year" field.

The InfoBox will automatically create links from certain entries, and Category tags for others. i.e., if there is a field that says "First Year:" and it was set to "1980", the template might create a Category tag for 1980 and a link to a "1980" History/Timeline page.

InfoBox Tags

On the Facebook Group, Steve Bjork suggested using the modern concept of tags (you know, like everything else in the world does these days). This would solve the challenges of making all hardware devices have the same number of fields (though the InfoBox can be made to just not display anything undefined).

See this List of Tags page for some ideas on this. I think this is how we should go!

Common

Every InfoBox will have the following fields:

  • Name (name) - will use PAGENAME if not specified
  • Photo (photo) - will use PAGENAME.jpg if not specified (or display/tag "MISSING PHOTO" if not there)
  • Caption (caption) - photo caption (or display/tag "MISSING PHOTO" if not there)
  • Date (date) - Month XX (if exact day is known, or display/tag "MISSING DATE" if not there)
  • Year (year) - Year of release/first year (or display/tag "MISSING YEAR" if not there)
  • Notes (notes) - a short description
  • Info Source (infosource) - where did the data come from? Link to other website, or note magazine article, etc. or the name of whoever submitted it. Credit where credit is due, please!

Some sections will use the same fields, but have different wording. For example, "year" might represent "Release Year" for a Software/Hardware item, but might be called "First Published:" for a Publication item, or "First Held:" for a convention.

Company and Convention

These use the same fields, but the descriptions might be different:

  • End Year (endyear) - last year operated or published (used as a Category)
  • Location (location) - City, State, country they were located? (used as a Category)

People

What special fields should be here?

Publication

Every Publication adds these extra fields, and anything extra will be added as tags:

  • Format (format) - Book, Magazine, Newsletter? (used as a Category)
  • End Year (endyear) - last year published (used as a Category)
  • ISBN (isbn)
  • ISBN-13 (isbn-13)
  • Language (language) - (used as a Category)
  • Pages (pages) - how many pages
  • Publisher (pbulisher) - (used as a Category)
  • Volume - ? what is the intent of this ?

Hardware and Software

Media/Category/Type ... There should be a category for "Cartridge" that shows everything that was a ROM-Pak or cartridge. This one category will show all the program paks, and hardware devices that plugged in through the cartridge port. That would mean the Multi-PAK would show up there too - fair? But, that said, we would have a different field for software (media) since Category and Type were used for the software itself. Is this okay? Hardware would use "Category" for "Cartridge" and Software would use "Media" for "Cartridge". Or do we want to make ROM-Pak a thing? Thus, "Cartridge" would show you anything that plugs in (ROM-Paks, things without ROMs, etc.) and "ROM-Pak" would just be program paks? That seems better. Let me think on this...

Hardware

  • Category - What did it plug in to? Cartridge, Serial, Joystick (used as a Category)
  • Type - What did it do? Floppy, Hard Drive, RS232, ??? (used as a Category)

Software

  • Category - Game, Productivity, Utility, OS, etc. (used as a Category)
  • Type - Shooter, Word Processor, Disk, etc. (used as a Category)
  • Media - Cassette, Disk, ROM-Pak (used as a Category)
  • Graphics Mode - VDG/GIME mode: 32, 80, 256x192x2, etc. (used as a Category)
  • Memory - 32K, 64K, 128K, etc. (used as a Category)
  • Platform - CoCo 1/2, CoCo 3 (used as a Category)
  • Requires - Joysticks, 6309, etc.

When I make the master InfoBox, it will be the "one box to rule them all" and include the various sections depending on the type specified. Because of that, fields that are common to subsets need to be noted -- i.e., Software and Hardware might both have Category and Type, but only software would have Graphics Mode.