Board Thread:Wiki Business/@comment-131168-20151116115724

This is not some change that is going to happen soon, and even if/when it does it should be pretty invisible to most users, but since there's some interesting stuff going on at Wikia with infoboxes I thought it would be worth sharing. They've made a new infobox format with two goals: better displaying on mobile as well as desktop/tablet view, and ease of coding.

The difference for the second part is pretty easy to see. I have made a version of the CD Infobox template in the new format. If you compare the contents of both the original Template:CD Infobox and the test Template:Sandbox/CD Infobox Portable, the latter is much shorter and easier to tell what's going on with it. If you're not working on making/editing the templates, though, they continue to work the same way, so it doesn't make much difference.

Something else neat they've added more recently is an image tabber system that is actually sort of functional on mobile. It allows for the images to be shown in a tabber on the desktop/tablet versions, while in the mobile version it simply lets you tap to scroll through the images sequentially. The biggest downside to this new method that I see is it doesn't allow both a short and long tab description as we currently have. If an image is set as "LA", that's all the text that's going to be shown with it. If it's set as "Limited Edition A" that will be shown, but that will make for a really long tab. It does automatically arrange tabs on multiple rows, so at least they don't overlap like regular tabbers can when there are a lot of images.

One remaining problem with the new type of infobox, but one it sounds like they will be improving on, is that it's hard to affect the overall look. The look can be very customized, but it has to be done with the aid of CSS. This both means only admins have access to it, and that it's hard to have something like the "color = pink" settings we currently use, since it would require some different CSS setups for each color possibility.

Right now at Template:Sandbox there are a few comparisons between how things look with the regular CD Infobox template as well as the test version in the new format. Speficially if you check the middle of the page for the "C\C (Cinderella\Complex) tabber" and "C\C (Cinderella\Complex) gallery" ones you can see a test of the new tab system. Note that I didn't do anything with the styling, so things like the coloring and way various fonts/text arrangements are set are completely the defaults. If you check the source of that page you can see the old and test versions are used almost exactly the same. The only thing I specifically changed was having all the parameters be lowercase for less confusion, but if we ever switch to a system like this, it should be easy enough to change the existing pages automatically.

 