I've completed recreation of Marvel Database:Volume Template with Lua.
I've changed, removed and added several things in the process:
Added
- Added division of volumes by status into:
- Active Series - for series that are currently published (User:Harasar/Sandbox/Amazing Spider-Man Vol 5)
- Finished Series - for series that already concluded (User:Harasar/Sandbox/Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1)
- Announced Series - for new series that were announced in solicits, but first issue wasn't yet published (User:Harasar/Sandbox/Amazing Spider-Man: Sins of Norman Osborn Vol 1)
- Canceled Series - for series that were completely canceled (for example, User:Harasar/Sandbox/Ant-Man (Cancelled) Vol 1 and User:Harasar/Sandbox/Blade Vol 6).
- Added categorization of volumes based on its total number of issues: "One Shots", "Volumes with 2 to 9 issues", "Volumes with 10 to 19 issues", ..., "Volumes with 100 to 109 issues", ..., "Volumes with 990 to 999 issues". I think it may be interesting to people to have easy way to find volumes of certain size to collect and read.
- Added "Volume End" categorization of volumes based on month and year of last published issue (only for "finished" volumes), similar to "Volume Debut" category.
- Added parameter "relaunches" to list issues in which volume was relaunched. For example, for User:Harasar/Sandbox/Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1:
relaunches = Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1 533; Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1 789
- Added automatic categorization of volumes into "Comic Books" categories (for example, Category:Spider-Man Comic Books) based on Module:Volume/Series. Template first checks entire page name (i.e. "Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1"), then parts of it (i.e. "Spider-Man"), and then "Featured" parameter.
Changed
- Issue gallery is created automatically from category based on page name, Lua can deal with all kinds of names (unlike the current version of template, that needs parameter "category" for some tricky names, for example The 'Nam Vol 1). Now parameter "category" is only needed, then template is used on the page with different name (like in my sandbox examples).
- Moved "running years" from top message into page title. I.e. instead of "Amazing Spider-Man Vol 5" page title is now displayed as "Amazing Spider-Man Vol 5 (2018-...)". The font for running years is different from normal, so it could be easily seen that it is not part of the volume name. For active series "..." is displayed instead of last year.
- Changed infobox and top message, merging them into one:
- Main message is based on several parameters and automatically adapts to different situations:
- Type - Ongoing / Limited / One Shot - if empty, then modules check number of issues:
- 1 - One Shot
- <=5 - Limited
- >5 - Ongoing
- Status - all variants (active, finished, announced, canceled) are calculated automatically, if not filled.
- Publisher - publishing company. DEFAULT: Marvel Comics
- Featured
- Dates of first and last issues are filled automatically. The text adapts for not yet released volumes, volumes there all issues were published in the same year and month, etc. Template also check if there is more than 6 months between following issues and counts them as relaunches.
- Type - Ongoing / Limited / One Shot - if empty, then modules check number of issues:
- Below the main message are several links:
- to previous and next volumes (if they exist)
- to volume category, with automatically counted number of issues
- to volume images category, with automatically counted number of images
- Main message is based on several parameters and automatically adapts to different situations:
Removed
- Removed navigation bars above and below issue gallery, because they only had links to categories, but links to these categories are present on the page in their usual place, so adding links to them in another part of page was redundant.
- Removed "creators" parameter, because different issues in volume, especially in long-running volumes, could have different creative teams.
- Removed "storyarcs", "storylines" and "crossovers" parameters from volume pages, because issues in volume could be part of many different stories, and individual issues are already categorized into corresponding categories, so listing them on volume pages is pointless, especially for long-running volumes.
Proposed addition and changes:
- Use one term, either "Volume", "Series" or "Comic Books" - right now different variants are used for different categories.
- Add categories "—/Annuals", "—/Specials", "—/TPB and HC"(or "—/Collections") for annuals and specials, associated with this volume, and TPB/HC in which issues from this volume were collected. Then add links to these categories into top message after number of issues and images.