Board Thread:Wiki Business/@comment-131168-20151124004519

So over in the S/mileage / ANGERME SELECTION ALBUM "Taiki Bansei" comments section, A Wikia contributor had a decent idea for an infobox improvement.

"Can the part of the info box that says "[Group] [Release] Chronology" link to the Discography page? And then for concert pages that part of the info box can link to the Concerts and Events page."

Maopyon suggested this be done by a simple addition to infoboxes where such a link could be toggled off and on, since not all groups have a discography page and making links that go nowhere would be a Bad Thing.

I've got a different idea that I think would be a bit more versatile. It would require a little manual setup for each group, but once done should be able to take effect in the infoboxes without further changes there--and any that don't have this manual setup should continue as-is.

I'm thinking of a switch template, something like Template:MB/Member. That takes as input the name of a group or individual, and gives output for each. I suggest something like this for the chronology links, so custom links and text could be set for different names. This would allow for things like S/mileage pages to link to ANGERME Discography, or groups without their own Discography page could just link to the appropriate section of their main page, like Sheki-Dol.

Actually, I'm thinking of a two-layer switch system, that would use not only the "artist" but the "type" given. When the type is Single or Album, a different link could be generated than when the type is something like DVD or Video Collection. Different sections could also be made to provide links for photobooks, concerts, or whatever other types of things we have infoboxes for around here.

Since each switch allows for a default output if the input didn't match any of the listed options, the default could just be to display things as they already are.

I can immediately see a few annoying kinks to work out on the coding side, but nothing insurmountable. But are there any larger problems with this that I'm not noticing?

As a brief test of the double-switch system, I set up a template with a very very few items.

Before:

After:

 