How/why does item lists so different?

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PurpleSerpent

Monster Hunter of Moderate Renown
Mindos said:


Why does one list in the chart format, with easy to search etc categories?
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Ah! To answer this, we have to talk about DPL listings.

Basically speaking, when the DDO Wiki was originally launched, we didn't have any software for automatically generating lists like these. DPL3, the software we do it with today, wasn't around when the wiki launched in 2006, and for a few years there wasn't really anything at all that could generate lists like these.

After a stint in the early 2010s using a now-discontinued third-party plugin called NiceCategoryList, we installed an early version of DPL3 onto the wiki, which allowed us to create handy templates - a template on MediaWiki is a special type of page where you write code, and can then call that code on other pages rather than having to write it down directly. DPL3 includes its own set of special templates we use to make other templates, which, in turn, can be used to create these lists.

Of course, the issue at this point was that we had thousands of categories that needed to have these templates added by hand, and no way of telling which categories still needed templates. Fixing this is still very much an incomplete project - I've just added one to Improved Destruction now, so thank you for pointing that out.

(There is another issue with "Named items category", the template that generates lists of items - it's a bit space-hungry, so if a page contains more than about 350 items, we can't use a table there, as it goes over the maximum size of 2.1MB per wiki page that MediaWiki allows. This is why the categories for augment slots no longer have these tables, for instance.)
 
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