User blog:LostInRiverview/Development blog: Cracking the Simbio template

So, I've begun work on the Simbio template, with the goal being to make this page look good. As you can see, I have currently added in some code (borrowed from Les Sims Wiki - thanks!) - that's the new 'blue bio box', as opposed to the current white bio box. My goal is to eventually have this colored bio available for all games; in essence, to replace the current simbio template with a colored one.

It gets more difficult than that, however. Where fr.sims.wikia was happy to leave the entire bio as one color, I'm not satisfied with that. So, in addition to updating simbio to the blue bio box, I also intend to update the simbio template so that each bio box is automatically set to a color scheme depending on which game is being referenced to. Currently, this is orchestrated on a minor scale in the simbio template, but I wish to change more than just the border color - there are multiple colors that need to automatically change.

I will be updating this blog as my work progresses, and eventually I'll have a working model to demonstrate here.

--  LostInRiverview talk · blog 15:22, June 5, 2011 (UTC)

I think I've figured out how to have the colors change by game, and it's based on vgversion and vgcolor. The trick was basically to create new templates for each variable color on the simbios (it turns out there are 5) and have a template correspond to each, with designated hexidecimal values assigned based on the game name, as given by its vgversion.
 * Update one - Fixing the colors

Let me put this in English. If the updated simbio template is used, and The Sims is inserted as the game where a particular Sim is found, then each color template will read the game name and produce a color based on the game name and the colors I assign it. That means that whenever the name is changed, the templates will read the new name and pick the correct colors. I'll show you this in action once I actually get it to work, since this is totally in theory as of this point!

--  LostInRiverview talk · blog 16:14, June 5, 2011 (UTC)