Forum:Portable infoboxes

Forums: Index > Village Dump > Portable infoboxes

Note: This topic has been unedited for 3426 days. It is considered archived - the discussion is over.

tl;dr version

So there's these infoboxes, see? And mobile devices don't always display them well, and that's getting worse. So we wrote a new way to code them - what's on the page stays the same, but the background stuff is different.

They aren't simple, but Sannse is trying to get her pretty little head around them and might be able to help.

Wanna give them a go?

Official Cut and Paste Version

Hi all,

We're contacting a few of our top communities, hoping to get you on board with the migration to the new infobox markup. And we have tools to help!

Why we’re doing this

Simply put: Most current infobox structure translates very poorly to mobile experiences, and indeed any device that doesn't use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that Wikia's traffic is trending mobile.

There is an important graph from our forum post about infoboxes a couple weeks back:

File:Wikia mobile traffic growth.jpg

Mobile is the future. Not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic - it's staggering.

We worked with the Wikia community to create this new markup to make sure that your hard work can be displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) easily and without any new coding conventions. It'll take some effort up front, to be sure, but we're here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future.

Tools we've designed to ease the process

We’ve enabled two new features on your community. One is a tool for migrating the "old" infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your wikia that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the "Generate draft markup" button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup.

The second is a new feature on Special:Insights that will highlight which infoboxes on your wikia have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. It's fairly intuitive - you can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the "Convert!" button on the right, which performs the same action as the "Generate draft markup" button.

This is our help page for the new markup. I'll make sure that one of my more techy colleagues is available to help if you need it, as well as watching this forum post for any questions.

Thanks -- sannse <staff /> (help forum | blog) 21:21, August 4, 2015 (UTC)

Discussion

• Mobile sucks. Separately, they should keep kids out of baseball parks, they spoil the experience.
• I have no problem with any of the above. Uncyclopedia uses Infoboxes for the sole purpose of resembling Wikipedia. In very many cases, the Infobox becomes a list. We discourage lists because lists in general and Infoboxes in particular tend to attract nonsense numbers, random lists of a country's exports and imports (that is, undeveloped repetition of stereotypes), and foreign-language humor.
• I have no problem if Infoboxes cease rendering on mobile devices entirely and the article stands or falls based on its paragraph prose. But I have a big problem if everyday Uncyclopedians (as Hillary Clinton would put it) need to learn the Wikia help page. The automatic recoding wizard is enormously helpful, if it works.
• This strikes me as a case where recoding 10% of the templates will address 90% of the situations.
• I sure hope that visiting Wikia Community to read that help page hasn't erased my Uncyclopedia preferences again. Spıke 🎙️14:51 5-Aug-15

PS--I was delighted to see that the said Special:Insights page works without dropping my preference for Uncyclopedia skin, and includes a neat list of all Infoboxes on Uncyclopedia, that the number of these is strictly limited, and that several of the Infoboxes are entirely unused and should be deleted. Bugs: Page 3 of this listing is null; the heading of the listing contains a red-link to the help page; the page does not refresh to reflect deletions and there is no Purge button. Spıke 🎙️15:06 5-Aug-15

The page should refresh in a bit, it's pulling from special pages which mostly update every 24 hours.

The auto-draft-creator-thingy is by no means perfect. It doesn't help with the CSS used to style the boxes (that goes on Mediawiki:Uncyclopedia.css) and it's definitely a draft rather than an end version. But it definitely helps, it's got me able to do a couple of fancy boxes on other wikias anyway (I did learning!) -- sannse <staff /> (help forum | blog) 17:30, August 5, 2015 (UTC)