This week we’re continuing with the auto-complete improvements, replacing some fields which were previously implemented as custom drop downs, such as the Disciplines and Backgrounds in World of Darkness. Using auto-complete still shows you the list of options, but it makes it easier to deal with changes to the game system configuration, for example when a character has a background that has been removed.
More changes are coming, but this week I wanted to take some time to highlight a feature that has been available for a while now, yet which not everyone knows about, even if it can help improve your experience on RPGpad by alot!
Lists by Tag
Often when setting up the rules or setting for your game, you will have a lot of pages that cover a specific topic, or which describe similar entries.
For example, you might have a number of houserules in your game, each described on its own page. You can tag all of these pages with the “Houserule” tag, allowing you to click the tag to see the list of pages with that tag.
But it would be much nicer of course if you could add a header on the start page of the Rules namespace where you list every house rule. Doing so is actually very easy! Simply add the following block to your page:
[show:index]
Tag [[Houserule]]
[/show]
The ‘show’ block tells RPGpad to show a list, and the Tag [[Houserule]] entry tells us that we should show the pages with the Houserule tag. That’s really all there is to it!
Lists by Content
When making lists, you aren’t limited to listing by Tag. You can also make lists of everything with a certain schema (like all people or all locations), or of everything which has a certain field set to a certain value.
For example, if you want a list of all planets in a certain star system, you could do the following:
[show]
Planets:
System [[Sol System]]
[/show]
The Planets: tells RPGpad to show only planets, and the System [[Sol System]] makes sure we only get planets that have the System field pointing to the Sol system. This will show a bullet point list of every planet in the Sol System.
You can go one level fancier though: if you have a picture set on each planet, you could use [show:tiles] instead of [show] in the first line instead, and the list would be displayed with images for each planet!
This kind of detail can really help bring a page to life and make it super easy to navigate the namespace. You could even create a gallery of important NPCs or of NPCs who work for a certain faction in this manner.
Getting some help with that
The above is a pretty powerful tool, but it can quickly be overwhelming. We wrote some help pages to help you out, of which I wanted to highlight two here:
- Community Help: Text for a description on how to create lists in Setting, Rules and Notes pages.
- Community help: Schemas for help on Schemas and Data structures.
As a third option, we frequent the Community Forum and would be more than happy to help you out if you post a request there. While there, why not check out this week’s changelog to see what we updated? We’d love to hear from you!