Anatomy of a Domain Box (Part 3) – AboutUs Badges

Over the past few days, we’ve been talking about some of the unique features and reference materials central to the AboutUs DomainBox, from links and registrar information to maps and how to modify them. For the final post in this series, we’ll talk a bit more about the “AboutUs Badges” section, what they’re for, why they’re great and how to add your own.

AboutUs Badges

The AboutUs Badges are a way for our community (and employees) to self-organize content on article pages, personal pages, help and other pages on our wiki. The badges serve a different purpose than barnstars do on other wikis in that they aren’t particularly about honoring achievement (individual and collaborative), more than they are designed to organize pages in order to signify communities, common interests and portals. (Although individuals are welcome to create “single badges” for themselves.)

Common examples of organized content badges include the WikiIndex badge which is an attempt to organize and list all the wiki domains on AboutUs, and the PortlandTech badge which signifies domains that are part of or related to the Portland technology industry.

Create your own badges

In addition to the variety of badges that have already been created by the AboutUs community, creating your own badge is as easy as making a template. To ensure that your badge will work along side others, there are a few standard guidelines:

1. Make the image
Badge images should be 150px x 57px. As you can see from the current badges above, by maintaining these sizes, they will correctly align with each other. NOTE: many graphics programs place a small white border around images when they are saved. In most of these cases, this can be changed via preferences or during the save process. Please take this into account when creating your badges.

2. Make your badge (template)
• Create at template page like [[Template:YourBadge]] (replace YourBadge with the name of your badge). Add this code:

<div style=”float: {{{1|left}}}; padding: 3px;”>
{{Clickpic|PageLink|http://images.aboutus.org/images/a/ab/
YourImage.png}}</div>
[[Category:AboutUsBadges]][[Category:AboutUs:Templates|Badges]]

• In order to get the images to click correctly via the template, change PageLink to the page that this badge will redirect to, and the http://images.aboutus.org/images/a/ab/YourImage.png to the permanent URL for your badge image.

3. Place your badge
• On DomainPages: Place the badge in the DomainBox. On a DomainPage, add a badges = {{YourBadge}} | into the “Domain_Page” template, like so:

{{ Domain_Page |
   reviews = <reviews></reviews> |
   vote = <vote></vote> |
   thumbnail = <thumbnail></thumbnail> |
   map = <map section=”Address”></map> |
   badges = {{YourBadge}} |
}}

• On other pages: Badges can also go on individual PersonalPages as well as other WikiPages, simply by adding them to the page like any other template. These will default to the left side of the page, but the way these are constructed, a “magic pipe” can changed the orientation. Simply add {{YourBadge|right}} to have your badge float on the right side of the page.

See also: Anatomy of a Domain Box (Part 1) – Links and Registrar Info, Anatomy of a Domain Box (Part 2) – Maps