User blog:Wingstrike/It's aLuave!

I make no apologies for the pun.

A while ago I started experimenting with Lua, a scripting language used on Wikia for more advanced functionality. However, due to work constraints I had to abandon learning and implementing it. Fortunately, with my report done and dusted, I've managed to get back into setting it up.

Most of you will have no idea what Lua is, or why it's useful, or noticed that it's now in use, which is fine mostly. As an advanced scripting tool I don't expect every user to be aware of the intricacies of Wikia's coding, but I figured it was better to let you know what was going on. In short using Lua in our templates will allow them to react more intelligently and possibly do more stuff with them.

An example of the recent addition is in the Character Templates; I wrote a somewhat clunky system that would look specifically for words like "Airbender" to assign it the right categories, but had to make sure "air bender" and "air-bender" were accounted for as well, because Wikitext was only capable of very specific matching. With Lua, it can now be programmed to search for specific terms, regardless of case or if a hyphen was added. This added flexibility makes the templates more powerful and reduces the odds of pages missing tags.

This may seem like a very technical and relatively low-key change, but I'm hoping to find more uses for Lua in the future that more people can make use of.