MediaWiki tricks 1 – Custom link colors

This is the first post in an irregular series of nifty tricks that saved my day when using MediaWiki and which maybe are useful for you, too…

Sometimes you may want to color a wikilink (for example in order to indicate that two wikilinks are pointing to fundamental different kinds content) with something different than standard blue for existant pages (Monobook).

A minimal wiki code example for turning a wiki link green:

[[ARTICLE|<span style="color:green;">ARTICLE</span>]]

The trick is to do the coloring inside the alternative text and not outside the link brackets (thanks to Shardsofmetal for the hint). However there is a problem: In case ARTICLE does not exist, the link would be still green instead of red for indicating missing content. Using the „ifexist“ function of the parser functions extension this can be solved (splitted one-liner):

[[ARTICLE|{{#ifexist: ARTICLE
|<span style="color:green;">ARTICLE</span>
|ARTICLE}}]]

Now the link turns green in case ARTICLE exists and stays with the default red in case not.

Of course this is rather long winded and you probably want to shorten this with a template if you’re using this more than once. So the template code would be like that:

[[{{{1}}}|{{#ifexist: {{{1}}}
|<span style="color:green;">{{{1}}}</span>
|{{{1}}}}}]]

The wiki code using such a link does look with the template much shorter now:

{{TEMPLATENAME|ARTICLE}}

But now there is a new problem when using a template. You sometimes want to link with a different expression like COOL PAGE to ARTICLE. The solution for the template code is using an optional second variable:

[[{{{1}}}|{{#ifexist: {{{1}}}
|<span style="color:green;">{{{2|{{{1}}}}}}</span>
|{{{2|{{{1}}}}}}}}]]

Now you can call it both ways:

{{TEMPLATENAME|ARTICLE}}
{{TEMPLATENAME|ARTICLE|ALTERNATIVE LINK TEXT}}


Dislcaimer: Make spare use of it. To much stuff at once cocks up the „wow nice effect“. 😉

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