<sumanah> anomie: we were just enjoying TemplateSandbox. Thank you for making it
<anomie> hi MatmaRex, sumanah! Glad you're liking it. I'm a little disappointed no one replied to my post on enwiki's WP:VPT about it.
<sumanah> anomie: lemme look at that
<MatmaRex> sumanah: i was thinking that it really needs some information on top. when you linked it, i had no idea what is it going to do
<MatmaRex> sumanah: my first though ws that it's going to copy some pages to my sandbox space
<sumanah> yeah, anomie, we ran into the same problem with APISandbox I think
<sumanah> it's an interesting UI challenge to explain what's happening
<sumanah> honestly, a 45-second screencast video might be useful
<MatmaRex> "You can use this special page to preview how a given page would look with a different set of templates." would do.
<MatmaRex> "You can choose a set of templates saved in you sandbox space by using an appropriate sandbox prefix – e.g., if you want to preview a version of Template:Test that you have saved as User:Foo/sandbox/Template:Test, use 'User:Foo/sandbox' as the prefix."
<anomie> MediaWiki:templatesandbox-text exists to put some text up there. I don't know if any change can get into 1.21wmf5 at this point though.
<MatmaRex> actually, i don't know if the above is correct, as there's no docs ~
<MatmaRex> it doesn't say if e.g. the namespace should be included
<MatmaRex> or what happens to the slash
<anomie> MatmaRex- Feel free to improve the docs: mw:Extension:TemplateSandbox. I'm not the greatest writer, I tend to assume too much prior knowledge.
<MatmaRex> anomie: also, the real thing i wanted to ask you: does it support rendering a page with versions of templates as they looked at the given revision? or does it just take the old wikitext?
<MatmaRex> or - could it support it with a reasonable amount of work put into it?
<MatmaRex> because while it's very nice, that would be *awesome*
<anomie> It just takes the old wikitext. We're trying to avoid making the interface too complicated, even using an old revision of a source page barely made the cut.
<MatmaRex> (there are people complaining about breaking compatibility with old revisions when we improve templates on pl.wiki...)
<anomie> OTOH, you could always just copy the old template revisions into a sandbox somewhere... ;)
<MatmaRex> anomie: yes, but what if you just want to view how certain page looked like on, say, the revision dated 5th of August 2010? you'd have to hunt down every revision of every template there
<MatmaRex> at this point you could just copy the old revision of the page as well and not need the special page
<MatmaRex> just some search&replace needed
<anomie> MatmaRex- It sounds like you really want mw:Extension:Memento for that.
I don't know if I'm misunderstanding this extension, but after following the given "How-To" steps nothing works.
I copied a test template under "User:FoXFTW/Sandbox/Template:Xyz" on my Wiki.
I then set the page name to a page currently using "Template:Xyz" and the prefix to "User:FoXFTW/Sandbox", upon clicking view I only get the current page without the changes from "User:FoXFTW/Sandbox/Template:Xyz".
Is this the correct use case? Or am I missing something?
Hi,
We shouldn't have an error when typing just wikitext (and neither page name nor rev id): wikitext is sufficient for testing some code.
Instead, when testing wikitext, we have to put a random page name to make the submitting work.