SMITE Esports Wiki:Tutorial/Shortcuts

As you may have noticed, there's a lot of manual repetitive work that can go into making wiki pages. You have to write out the tabs every time, or you have to type a bunch of numbers into a chart, etc. etc. The good news is, there's a lot of shortcuts available! We already discussed making wiki templates, but there's other things you can do using external programs to make your life a lot easier.

Excel
(Excel or OpenOffice or LibreOffice or even Google Docs will all work, but for our examples I'm going to use Excel.)

Remember when we talked about making templates for TabsHeaders that you had to use in bulk? What if you need to modify them enough that that's not as appealing of an option? For an example, let's look at player stats pages. We want to add stats boxes for all LCS players including results from all their tournaments. We could in theory use a template for this, because the pages have very similar text. But there's enough variation from page to page that we'd have to make a ton of templates. Some players played in EU LCS Spring Split S3 and then never again. Some played in EU and then NA. Some have played in all 4 splits (as of writing this article). We really need to have the code all directly written in each player's page, but even with creative copy-pasting that's still typing the player's name at least 4-6 times per page. What can we do instead? The answer is write some code in Excel to generate our wikitext! Look at the following two screenshots:





As you can see, typing the name "Xpecial" fills "Xpecial" in every location where we need the player's name, and then if we need to delete a split or change a split from NA to EU here and there, it's not a huge deal. For the vast majority of pages, this is going to be at least 3-4 times faster than it would be to set up the page any other way.

How does it work? The cells concatenate the pre-written text that we gave it with whatever string is in F6, in this case "Xpecial" (or any other player's name). The operator to concatenate text like this is &. If we wanted we could write

 =$F$6&$F$6&$F$6

We'd get "XpecialXpecialXpecial" or "MataMataMata" depending on what player name we typed in.

What about the $s? those control the way the formula behaves if you copy-paste it from one set of cells to another.

If you want to learn more about Excel, Google is your best friend. Some commands you may want to look up to help specifically with making wikitext:
 * OFFSET
 * MATCH
 * ROW
 * COLUMN

Notepad++
Notepad++ is an extremely valuable resource when making edits to large templates or tables (such as VODs) or when writing complicated templates. The two primary functions that you will want to make use of are extended search and regular expression search. You can use these functions in a lot of ways, for example to clean up unnecessary newlines, or to add "|-" between otherwise properly-formatted rows of a table, or to "clean out" a template (i.e. to remove all of the variable values while keeping the rest of the structure intact).

Some resources that may help:
 * Notepad++: A guide to using regular expressions and extended search mode (Mark's Speechblog)
 * How to use regular expressions in Notepad++ (tutorial) (Compiled blog)

Other Text Editor Resources

 * Wikipedia:Text editor support (wikipedia.com)
 * Which text editor supports syntax highlighting for Wiki code? (stackoverflow.com)
 * Copy Excel Tables to MediaWiki format - may need to reformat header and change  to