Real Life Soap Wiki:Wikia tour creation and improvement

(Please leave on the talk page any feedback about whether this method makes sense.)

Introduction
The tour makes use of the shared template at w:Template:Wikia tour.

(We recommend you set up a working mini-tour of your wiki before thinking of joining the list.)

To create your Wikia tour then link it in, please follow these instructions. (Some of these links are red on purpose. This page is designed so that everything below this paragraph will work when the whole page is pasted into your Wikia. The word "Project" can be left alone but it should automatically redirect to your wiki's equivalent namespace.) To set up, you may just use your sandbox, but for something more permanent (good when a user wants to insert new pages later) make a purpose-built page (before copying anything from here) called Project:Wikia tour creation and improvement.

Copy this Wikia Central page then work on your copy

 * 1) Copy this whole page and paste it into your wiki's sandbox or the purpose-built page suggested above.
 * 2) Save it and work from it (preferably keeping it in a separate window). (Its links will point to the right places, either on Wikia Central, for things you need to copy, or to existing or future pages on your Wikia.)

Create basic structure

 * 1) Copy our wikicities:Category:Wikia tour to your Category:Wikia tour.
 * 2) Copy our wikicities:Project:Wikia tour to your Project:Wikia tour. Edit it to describe your own wiki rather than Wikia Central. In the second link ("Go to the next Wikia..."), change "Scratchpad" to "Wikia".
 * 3) Copy our wikicities:Project:Wikia tour/End to your  Project:Wikia tour/End. In the second link, change "Scratchpad" to "Wikia" as you have just done with Project:Wikia tour. (That's so that tourists, either during or after your tour, may easily go on or back to Wikia Central - until another tour is added: see below).

Main Page creation
Your first substantive page (found from "Continue tour") should be Project:Wikia tour/Main Page. First paste in the following:

Main Page editing
Then edit the various fields of this template you just pasted in. The "namespace" and "page" refer to the namespace and page of the page this tour stop is viewing. For the Main Page, this is usually blank (ie "main") for the "namespace" and "Main Page" for the "page".

The "next" variable is the exact page name of the next stop in your tour. This does not have to be "about us". Change it to whatever you like. For example, you may want a featured article there, so change it to "Featured". (For an ultra-short mini-tour, make "next=End"!! But you'd better add a bit before linking to the main tour.)

The "commentary" is a description of the current stop. It can have links, paragraphs, and images, BUT NOT TEMPLATES.

Now more, one at a time
Click on the "continue tour" link and paste . Replace the stars with the correct variables (using the guidelines for "Main Page editing" above). (Namespaces other than "main" can be used, but "Category" will not display articles and subcategories at present.)

Keep doing this until you reach the end of the tour. ('No need to do them all now'; insertion of other pages later is fairly easy; several of our tours started with only the Main Page and one or two others.)

Last one for now
You should use "next=End" on the last page.

Your internal tour should now work. Try it. Link to it from your Community Portal or wherever (even from other sites).

Join the main tour

 * 1) Now, to link in so that Wikia tourists can be led easily to yours after touring other wikicities, go to the list of wikis in this tour.
 * 2) Add your wiki at the end.
 * 3) Go to the tour page of the one that appears just before yours.
 * 4) View both their first page - project:Wikia tour - and their last page - project:Wikia tour/End  - and change the "Go to the next Wikia..." links there to point to your own tour instead of at Wikia Central.

Take the full tour to check that nobody has left a break in the chain. There were three after the thirteenth Wikia was added!

When someone else makes a new tour, they will link to it from yours.