Make-a-Wiki

An Obsidian plugin for worldbuilding — give every character, item, place or faction a wiki-style infobox: a floating card with a picture, a table of facts and coloured badges, built from a small block of text in the note and edited through a form.

It's a sister plugin to Tell-A-Tale: Tell-A-Tale tells the story, Make-a-Wiki keeps its wiki — and the avatar you give a character here shows up next to their dialogue there.

This is a WIP: things may change or break as it evolves. Expect some bugs here and there.

Features

• Floating infobox — picture, heading and a table of facts, floated to the right of the note like a wiki page
• No theme or snippet needed — the box is styled by the plugin and follows your theme's colours, light and dark
• Templates — a built-in Character template, plus your own (Item, Location, Faction…), each with its own fields, folder, file name, tag and body sections
• Forms — create a new sheet or edit an existing one from a form; never touch the block unless you want to
• Coloured badges — per value (Female → pink, Rare → yellow) or for any value, using your theme's accent colour by default
• Note properties — the image and any field can be mirrored into the note's properties, for Tell-A-Tale, Dataview, Bases or card/banner plugins
• Safe editing — edits go through the open editor (Ctrl+Z undoes them), target the exact block you clicked, and never drop data the form doesn't know about
• Image paths that follow renames — move or rename a picture and every sheet using it is updated

Installation

From Obsidian Community Plugins

Not listed yet. Until then:

Manually

1. Download main.js, styles.css and manifest.json from the latest release
2. Put them in <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/make-a-wiki/
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Make-a-Wiki in Settings → Community plugins

Quick start

1. Ctrl+P → "Make-a-Wiki: New Character" (or "New sheet…" to choose a template)
2. Fill in the form — only the first field is required — and pick an image
3. The note is created with the infobox at the top and the template's sections below it

Hover the box for the ✎ edit button (and the image for change image). Everything is also available from the command palette:

What a sheet looks like in the note

The infobox is a code block named after its template. It stays readable as plain text:

```character
image: Media/Alice/portrait.png
name: Alice Tanaka
age: 17
gender: Female
birthplace: [Fictional, Japan]
languages: [Japanese, English]
tags: [Curious, Patient, Shy]
```

Lists are written [a, b, c]. Keys the template doesn't know about still show up in the box (in italics), and are kept when you save from the form.

Templates

Settings → Make-a-Wiki → Templates. Each template has:

• Name and block id — "Item" → notes use an ```item block
• Folder — where new notes go
• File name and title property — patterns using field keys, e.g. {name} and {name} ({rarity})
• Tag — added to new notes (Tell-A-Tale finds characters by tag)
• Infobox heading and body sections (each section becomes a ### heading in new notes)
• Fields — label, key and type:

The 👁 button on a field shows or hides it in the infobox — hidden fields stay in the form (the Character template's Colour starts hidden). The ⚙ button sets its badge colours, form hint, and whether it's saved as a note property. Any field takes any text — names in kanji, Cyrillic, emoji…

Renaming a field key or a block id offers to update every note that uses the template. Templates can be shared: open Share or import this template as JSON, copy, and paste into another vault.

Working with Tell-A-Tale

Make-a-Wiki and Tell-A-Tale share character data through note properties:

Avatar — in Tell-A-Tale, set Settings → Avatar property to avatar (installs that predate the setting have it off). If you use a different property name there, add it to Make-a-Wiki's Image properties setting too.

Dialogue colour is opt-in: it's only written when you pick a colour in a character's form. Leave it empty and Tell-A-Tale keeps the colour it generates on its own. Two independent switches, both in the Character template editor:

• 👁 on the Colour field — show the colour as a swatch in the infobox. Off by default; the field is in the form either way.
• ⚙ → Also save as note property — color by default, which is what sends it to Tell-A-Tale. Clear it to keep colours out of Tell-A-Tale entirely.

Settings

• Placeholder image — shown when a sheet has no picture (empty = built-in placeholder)
• Image properties — note properties that mirror the sheet image, comma-separated (default cover, avatar)

What the plugin accesses

Everything stays in your vault: no network requests, no telemetry, no clipboard.

• Reads and writes notes — only to create a sheet, save the form, or set an image, always through Obsidian's API (and through the open editor when the note is open, so Ctrl+Z works).
• Lists the files in your vault in two places:
  • the image picker, to show the images you can choose;
  • when you rename or move an image, to find the sheets that point to it and update their paths. Only notes that contain the old file name are opened.
• Renaming a field key or block id in a template asks first, then updates the notes that use that template.

Development

git clone https://github.com/BrunoJalesSousa/obsidian-make-a-wiki
cd obsidian-make-a-wiki
npm install

npm test          # unit + end-to-end tests (fake Obsidian API)
npm run dev       # watch mode
npm run build     # production build → main.js

Copy main.js, styles.css and manifest.json to your vault's .obsidian/plugins/make-a-wiki/ folder.

Releasing

Bump the version in manifest.json, package.json and versions.json, commit, then push a tag with the same number:

git tag 1.0.2 && git push origin 1.0.2

The release workflow builds the plugin and attaches main.js, styles.css and manifest.json to a GitHub release — which is what Obsidian installs from.