Page Forms
Page Forms is a MediaWiki extension that makes it easy to create templates and can turn pages from free-form text into a form-based structured page. This way, pages gain structure, defined through templates. Page Forms allows you to reduce repetitiveness, create a template for all pages of a certain type to follow, and organize your data and wiki pages much better.
Installation
To install Page Forms on your wiki, you can use Self Service. You will need to be the wiki owner to complete these steps.
Steps:
- Go to Self Service.
- Log in with your Client Panel credentials.
- Select the wiki on which you wish to install the extension. Then, click "Manage wiki settings".
- Press "Wiki extensions".
- Click on "Add extension".
- Select Page Forms on the dropdown and press "Install".
Creating templates
Page Forms lets you create templates that can display in various ways, including as a table, as plain text, and as an infobox.
You can do so by visiting Special:CreateTemplate on your wiki.
These templates can be added. If you want to go one step further and allow the template to be the structure of a page and you want a pretty page to input the data for each template field, you should create a form.
Creating forms
A form provides a structured way to edit a template, done so by allowing form-based editing of one or more templates on that form, and providing different types of fields to facilitiate editing of the form data without needing to interact with raw wikitext code.
Once you have a template, you can go to Special:CreateForm and add one or more templates to the form. This will populate the form with the fields specified in the template. Creating a form means creating a methodical way to edit the template, by displaying the edit page as input boxes rather than editing the template using wikitext. Pages that use templates made from these forms will then use the structured form to hold content, rather than free-form text from a normal wiki page.
To turn a page into a form, go to the source editor ("Edit source") and add {{#default_form:FormName}} on the form, and replace FormName with the actual name of the form.