Wikibooks:Reading room/Technical Assistance

Welcome to the Technical Assistance reading room. Get assistance on questions related to MediaWiki markup, CSS, JavaScript, and such as they relate to Wikibooks. This is not a general-purpose technical support room.

To submit a bug notice or feature request for the MediaWiki software, visit Phabricator.

To get more information about the MediaWiki software, or to download your own copy, visit MediaWiki

There are also two IRC channels for technical help: #mediawiki for issues about the software, and #wikimedia-tech for WMF server or configuration issues.

Renaming Book Pages

How do I rename a Book Page? When I change the name of the Book Page, it seems that the link to the old page is broken and I have copy the old content to the new page that was created as a result of renaming. TIA!

--Rjbfigueroa (discuss • contribs)

@Rjbfigueroa: Can you give an example of a page you wanted to move, and where you wanted to move it to, so we can see what happened?

Fwiw, here's how to move a page, if you're using Vector skin (in the desktop interface, rather than the mobile one): View the page you want to move (not its talk page). There should be a control bar at the top of the browser, and way over on the far right of it there should be a dropdown menu. The only option on that menu should be either "rename" or "move"; use that. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs)

DISPLAYTITLE template

Hello, does the DISPLAYTITLE template work only on the title page of a book. It doesn't center the heading in the Oberon/bootman page. Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 14:47, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

DISPLAYTITLE is actually a "magic word": see mw:Help:Magic words#Technical metadata. It just doesn't allow much customization; for example you can't radically alter the displayed title. I think also that it doesn't accept all CSS, and "text-align:center;" simply doesn't work. And I doubt there is a workaround.

My advice is to ignore DISPLAYTITLE, and instead use the template {{book title}} underneath it, which will be centered. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 20:53, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

The page is just one in a book. Therefore "book title" seems illogical; no offense intended. An appropriate visual appearance can be achieved with a div tag. Is that objectionable? Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 18:02, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

No not at all, it does exactly the same thing. All the template does is add a div tag and little CSS, so it makes no difference. Take a look at its source. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 18:10, 10 October 2020 (UTC)