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− | |I didn't dig into the history of our templates, but of all the infobox templates, {{tl|Author}}, {{tl|Book}}, {{tl|Building}}, {{tl|Computer game}}, {{tl|Conflict}}, {{tl|Deity}}, {{tl|Dragon magazine}}, {{tl|Dungeon magazine}}, {{tl|Item}}, {{tl| |
+ | |I didn't dig into the history of our templates, but of all the infobox templates, {{tl|Author}}, {{tl|Book}}, {{tl|Building}}, {{tl|Computer game}}, {{tl|Conflict}}, {{tl|Deity}}, {{tl|Dragon magazine}}, {{tl|Dungeon magazine}}, {{tl|Item}}, {{tl|State}}, {{tl|Organization}}, {{tl|Plane}}, {{tl|Planet}}, {{tl|Ritual}}, and {{tl|Spell}} (and all sub-templates) all use right-justification, whereas {{tl|Class infobox}}, {{tl|Creature}} (and all sub-templates), {{tl|Information}}, {{tl|Location}}, and {{tl|Person}} are left-justified (mostly due to recent changes by Niirfa-sa). |
I kinda like that our wiki is different from other wikis, and I believe we can create our own style (note the relatively recent addition of the map background image, the {{tl|On this day}}, {{tl|Featured image}}, and {{tl|DidYouKnow}} features on the front page, for example), but we don't need to be quirky just for quirkiness's sake. I will fix whatever templates need fixing once we come to a decision, but I'd like to hear from more people first. I'm sure BadCat will chime in when he's awake, but [[User:Hashimashadoo|Hash]]? [[User:Daranios]]? [[User:Terrorblades]]? [[User:LadySilverhair]]? anyone?...Bueller?...Bueller?... |
I kinda like that our wiki is different from other wikis, and I believe we can create our own style (note the relatively recent addition of the map background image, the {{tl|On this day}}, {{tl|Featured image}}, and {{tl|DidYouKnow}} features on the front page, for example), but we don't need to be quirky just for quirkiness's sake. I will fix whatever templates need fixing once we come to a decision, but I'd like to hear from more people first. I'm sure BadCat will chime in when he's awake, but [[User:Hashimashadoo|Hash]]? [[User:Daranios]]? [[User:Terrorblades]]? [[User:LadySilverhair]]? anyone?...Bueller?...Bueller?... |
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I encountered something weird on {{tl|State}}: see [[Vastar]]. Historical events sit in the left-hand column, so really long events stretch it out and cram up the right-hand column, which then splits over multiple lines. I can't recall if it did that before. I think I ought to be able to just switch the order to "date" followed by "event" and have it fit nicely. I'll tackle that another day unless Moviesign or Niirfa have a good reason why I shouldn't touch it. :) |
I encountered something weird on {{tl|State}}: see [[Vastar]]. Historical events sit in the left-hand column, so really long events stretch it out and cram up the right-hand column, which then splits over multiple lines. I can't recall if it did that before. I think I ought to be able to just switch the order to "date" followed by "event" and have it fit nicely. I'll tackle that another day unless Moviesign or Niirfa have a good reason why I shouldn't touch it. :) |
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|[[User:BadCatMan|— BadCatMan]] ([[User talk:BadCatMan|talk]]) 12:56, October 23, 2014 (UTC)}} |
|[[User:BadCatMan|— BadCatMan]] ([[User talk:BadCatMan|talk]]) 12:56, October 23, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | |I switched the columns of dates and events in the State template, so see how you like it now. If that's not good enough, we can make more specific adjustments to the template, or perhaps create another version of {{tl|split table}} to format this better. I'm thinking we might want to do this for dates/rulers also. See [[Silverymoon]]. |
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+ | |—[[User:Moviesign|Moviesign]] ([[User talk:Moviesign|talk]]) 13:29, October 23, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | {{Forum post|Looks good, thanks. |
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+ | Yeah, I don't think we have anything consistent for rulers and owners (in {{tl|Building}}), and I've never quite been satisfied with the style of split table bolding one column. |
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+ | |[[User:BadCatMan|— BadCatMan]] ([[User talk:BadCatMan|talk]]) 13:37, October 23, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | |If you like it, I will leave it like that. The problem with this sort of info is that we don't know how many data points there will be. The State template allows for 4 events, a split table will handle up to 20 items without adding heaps of parameters to the template. If you have opinions or suggestions on how to handle tabular data in an infobox, you might want to start a new forum thread as this one is quite long already and more focused on tabs and the infobox as a whole. |
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+ | |—[[User:Moviesign|Moviesign]] ([[User talk:Moviesign|talk]]) 14:13, October 23, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | {{Forum post|No, it's fine. I don't have any ideas right now, and it's a problem for another day.|[[User:BadCatMan|— BadCatMan]] ([[User talk:BadCatMan|talk]]) 05:41, October 24, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | |Hay, side note, I wanted to add tabs for the images for Arvoreen (The different icons in edition forms) But I'm guessing that would be a bit to many tab sections for one info box? Toughs? |
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+ | |[[User:Terrorblades| Terrorblades ]]'s Far Realm logs dated 12:15, October 28, 2014 (UTC) |
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+ | |I don't think it would be too much. You can use [[Drow]] as an example. If there are lots of images, you can use a slideshow like I did on [[Heralds of Faerûn]]. |
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+ | |—[[User:Moviesign|Moviesign]] ([[User talk:Moviesign|talk]]) 12:37, October 28, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | |Hmm that is very nice, is there any way to make it more "center"? |
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+ | |[[User:Terrorblades| Terrorblades ]]'s Far Realm logs dated 12:59, October 28, 2014 (UTC) |
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+ | }} |
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+ | {{forum post|Make what more center?|—[[User:Moviesign|Moviesign]] ([[User talk:Moviesign|talk]]) 12:07, October 29, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | {{Forum post|The Slideshow to me seams like is leaning to the right. Maybe that's just me? I mean on "The Heralds" ofc.|[[User:Terrorblades| Terrorblades ]]'s Far Realm logs dated 12:15, October 29, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | |Oh, that's the way the slideshow displays. I don't think I can change it, but I'll look into it. |
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+ | EDIT: Fixed! it was easier than I thought. :) |
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+ | |—[[User:Moviesign|Moviesign]] ([[User talk:Moviesign|talk]]) 12:34, October 29, 2014 (UTC)}} |
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+ | |Nice :D! Thanks! |
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+ | |[[User:Terrorblades| Terrorblades ]]'s Far Realm logs dated 19:49, October 29, 2014 (UTC) }} |
Latest revision as of 16:42, 27 September 2015
Use the following template for a nicely presented post:
{{Forum post|Write your message here!|~~~~}}
- I think it was mentioned somewhere that the tabber thing doesn't work on mobile devices. I have no idea what this looks like viewed on a phone.
- The infobox changes size dynamically when tabs contain different amounts of content. This may cause the text of an article to re-flow around the box (at least I hope it does, rather then overlap) which could lead to some ugly situations on any given page.
- Putting an infobox inside an infobox makes the text very small. The CSS will probably have to be adjusted so the text isn't so tiny. Oh, and to remove the extra border.
- We may have to make the infobox wider to accommodate the extra padding (which results in lost width) that the tabber puts in.
- It makes a messy template even messier, but damn if that isn't cool.
What do you think, sirs?
Right, now it looks fine in the Oasis skin: the infobox width remains fixed; the length changes, but the text readjusts. In Monobook, however, the width changes and the Basic Information box spills out of the tabber box.
It doesn't work at all in Mobile: no tabs, every edition is shown, 5e, 4e, 3e, 2e, 1e, all at once with a lot of different rows. They're not even labelled by edition.
Does it really need the extra infobox inside? Are the raw tables of before a problem?
I'd rather the infobox wasn't made wider, as the article space is already quite narrow in the Oasis skin, and that would affect the layout of some pages.
Okay, we need to make a decision before I put the effort into adding tabs to our infoboxes. Assuming that it will not work on mobile devices or in monobook for the foreseeable future, should we make this change? I can mitigate the problem for mobile devices by adding a section header for each edition so that the content will at least be divided up for them and look pretty much like the infoboxes look now. Everybody will see the dividers regardless of their viewing platform, unless the CSS has a way to make the distinction between mobile and non-mobile.
I wish Wikia was still maintaining Monobook. It's vastly cleaner, faster, and easier to use than Oasis, and it's my default. But Oasis is the default for everybody who comes to the wiki, and I imagine most members use it now anyway. For that reason, I'd say go ahead. We should use our best features to greet the most users, and that's Oasis.
Infoboxes in Monobook have been bent for a long time: alignment grids are stretched and tables are all spaced out. It's probably a problem specific to Monobook, and I've gotten used to it being funky. Monobook is the probably the domain of stubborn old editors like me, and will probably be removed one day. The Mobile skin, meanwhile, always looks like crap; putting edition headings is sufficient to solve that problem.
We probably should default to the latest edition tab, where there is information present for it.
I'm not planning to add any more color palettes and I think the ones I've worked out at the moment are pretty contrasty (I've actually increased the contrast between the text and the background color to some degree). But if it's still too hard to read I'll look into altering them further.
Other than stylistic stuff, I'm also planning to differentiate the planar creature templates a little bit more in the future, adding a few inputs that are relevant only to creatures from a certain kind of plane or possibly removing some which aren't relevant. I haven't gotten around to that yet though, as my main priority ATM has been adding new material from the 5th edition Player's Handbook.
The conflict is at its most obvious when using the alignment grid, which when placed inside an infobox doesn't follow either guideline by default but instead it's own internal direct to float left or right. I tried disabling the float directive so that it would instead go where the rest of the text does but it doesn't work that way - without a float directive it floats naturally to the left, which makes it out of place in right-aligned templates.
Basically, what it comes down to is do we want infobox cells to be aligned toward the right or the left?
- It requires less coding. Unless told otherwise, infobox cells default to left alignment because that's the way that text normally aligns on English-language websites. As a result, right alignment is something that must be explicitly coded, whereas left alignment is inferred.
- I think it looks neater. With right alignment, there's a large amount of white space in the middle and there's also a tendency for long lines of text like lists to look a bit weird, because the text moves away from the right rather than from the left as is typical in English.
- Nearly all other wikis use left-alignment (including several of our sister wikis like the Baldur's Gate Wiki or the Eberron Wiki). As a general rule I look to other wikis as a model for aesthetics and styling.
I kinda like that our wiki is different from other wikis, and I believe we can create our own style (note the relatively recent addition of the map background image, the {{On this day}}, {{Featured image}}, and {{DidYouKnow}} features on the front page, for example), but we don't need to be quirky just for quirkiness's sake. I will fix whatever templates need fixing once we come to a decision, but I'd like to hear from more people first. I'm sure BadCat will chime in when he's awake, but Hash? User:Daranios? User:Terrorblades? User:LadySilverhair? anyone?...Bueller?...Bueller?...
The creature template looks like it fit the creatures info without making it to big and the spell template looks to me to fit nicely with the less words making it more direct.
Other then that yes having out own style is very important, its the different features that makes other wiki's get an eye for you... Just like when we talk about new features we usually mention other wikis and show there pages as examples of what we think would be cool/informative. My two coppers. :)
?useskin=wikiamobile
to the end of the URL) then it still looks terrible, but the section headings are there to separate the edition-specific info. Viewing in Monobook (?useskin=monobook
) seems fine, but I defer to BadCatMan who has more experience with Monobook. Please try it out and let me know of any problems or suggestions. The data in those infoboxes is dummy data not guaranteed to be correct.
Just for fun, you can see how the infobox appears for 6 randomly selected deities by clicking here. Click the "Re-roll" link to generate a new set of 6. Just ignore the references, and you will probably have to scroll down to see them all because putting multiple infoboxes on a page is just weird.
Moviesign: Brilliant, the alignment grid is evenly spaced now. The infobox at User:Moviesign/Sandbox3.1 is working properly in all three skins in Firefox and Google Chrome, though Wikia Mobile is still funky: the "X Edition Statistics" all have different left–right alignments, nothing is consistent. In IE 8, Monobook is good, Oasis looks rubbish, probably as you saw. I also the browser on a Samsung/Android tablet: same results as Firefox and Chrome.
Colour-coding: I don't see the need for colour-coding myself, I was going to delete it a while back as it wasn't being used. But I really can't muster an argument against it, so meh.
I'd like an original, uniform visual style for the wiki, but it's beyond my styling and coding abilities. Maybe it's an issue for the Community Development Team, to polish things a bit. One day, when we've sorted out the crunch and clean-up.
Infobox alignment: Wow, now you point it out, I really see it now... I much prefer the left alignment. It looks so much neater and tidier. You naturally read from left to right in English, and ignore space on the right, so left alignment appears much cleaner. It's also easier to link headings to entries. I vote left alignment!
The tabs will start working when I update the templates. The Deity template is about done and will be deployed shortly. The rest of the infoboxes that have edition-specific sections will hopefully follow suit soon. You shouldn't have to change anything, they will just appear when I make the switch.
However, one teeny quirk: for Ilmater in the Oasis skin, when you move from any tab to the 4e tab, the entries in the Basic Information section above slide a smidgeon to the left. And back again when you click a different tab.
By process of elimination, the column shifting is being caused by the presence or absence of a line that wraps to the following line. The left-hand column is set to "nowrap" but the right-hand column is "normal". When the tab being displayed contains a long line that wraps to fit in the box, the whole infobox is re-rendered and the right-hand column gets slightly smaller and the left-hand column gets slightly bigger (don't ask me why). If there are no long lines in the tab being displayed, then the opposite is true. For the Ilmater page, the 4e tab has no long lines that wrap, while the 3e, 2e, and 1e tabs do. The only way I know to correct this is to use a fixed-width table layout, specifying the width of the columns. This would have to be done on a case-by-case basis (the Deity template will have different sized columns than the Person template, etc.) and might not look good on all screen sizes/font sizes, but that has yet to be determined. I'll see if I can make a test page.
I encountered something weird on {{State}}: see Vastar. Historical events sit in the left-hand column, so really long events stretch it out and cram up the right-hand column, which then splits over multiple lines. I can't recall if it did that before. I think I ought to be able to just switch the order to "date" followed by "event" and have it fit nicely. I'll tackle that another day unless Moviesign or Niirfa have a good reason why I shouldn't touch it. :)
Yeah, I don't think we have anything consistent for rulers and owners (in {{Building}}), and I've never quite been satisfied with the style of split table bolding one column.
EDIT: Fixed! it was easier than I thought. :)