Forum:Scribunto

Yo everyone,

Just got back from E3 Friday, still exhausted so I'm just gonna drop this knowledge on you all - Wikia has this swaggified new way to make templates. It's from an extension called Scribunto ('tis Latin for "they will write" or something) and essentially lets you write templates in a programming language called Lua. Google it if you're interested. Since I'm tight with Grunny, the engineer spearheading its release, he says he'll gladly enable it here for us earlier than most wikis.

Lua lets us do some pretty cool things with templates, but it's also 9001 times faster than parser functions (i.e., , etc.). Compare the top two pages on w:c:sactage:Special:ParserSpeed - the topmost one is a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops Challenges, the one below it is the same page but done using Lua (Template:Challenge is what the Lua will be replacing).

This forum isn't as much of a "hey, there's a cool new feature we ought to try out, thoughts?" as a "hey, there's a cool new feature and we will be trying it out because it's awesome, thoughts on cool stuff we can try / templates we can port to Lua?". So, seriously, if there's any requests you guys have for me (or anyone else who wants to try Lua), just throw 'em here.

To make something clear: this does not mean we have to port every single template here to Lua - you can all go about using parser functions and normal wikitext like nothing ever changed - but I will be changing our Infobox templates to Lua, as Wikia would like infoboxes to follow some sort of standard and Lua lets this happen .

So, yeah. There's that. 16:44, June 15, 2014 (UTC)