Ok, time for round 2 of hit & miss ^_^ lol...
Hit: The widget system is nice.
Miss: The widget bar puts it's curvy self in between 2 strait edged
boxes. Opening up an area in between the options and the page is fine,
but not when it doesn't flow.
Hit: A widget dashboard is nice.
Miss: In Slate the widgets inside are styled white like the page, but
the edit and X links are still white making them invisible.
Miss: We have one dashboard and no links to it outside of the Special
pages. I suggest using the parameter after the / to name dashboards, and
placing a list of created dashboards and form to create new ones on the
main dashboard page.
Suggestion: Many people have issues with the right sidebar, when
managing widgets, give a symbol on the sidebar that will allow people to
move it to the left. And even, give them the ability to create a
secondary sidebar on the other side (For those users with exceptionally
large screens that can make use of it) (Perhaps users with tall screens
could toggle between double and single column modes for the toolbox, etc...)
Hit: Putting the MediaWiki:Sidebar inside of one box separated by
headers, and giving it 2 columns was an awesome idea. It's optimized
space for that, and an old sidebar which flowed past the screen now fits
in a compact space.
Miss: You forgot to send the headers through the wfMsg, they are no
longer localize-able, and for project like the WGEP that use something
like sitename in the sidebar then use MediaWiki:Sitename to change that
to the real name of the site that should display, we have a horrid
'sitename' in our sidebar.
Hit: A RecentChanges widget is nice, helps keep track of it.
Miss: Things like author, time, and breaks between days are missing.
Using the current one I can't accurately tell anything about the wiki.
Miss: You forgot to filter bot edits from the Widget. Irrelevant or en
masse edits show up in the widget causing confusion.
Hit: A wide logo is a pretty good idea, gives good content space and
doesn't take up any important room.
Miss: Erm... 266? What happened to 250 or 275... And what's with the 6?!
Miss: Background == Bad... 90% of Wikia logos as far as I remember are
transparent. You're letting people colorize things, but putting a
background in the logo is a bad idea. They should be made transparent to
fit properly with all schemes (If you're worried about black/white
differences, throw a border around the text. Or put a rounded box in the
logo and put the transparency outside of it)
Suggestion: The Google ads, don't fit well with the small size,
especially with only one ad in that large area. Using one or two of the
Half Banners (234x60px) over top each other, or 2 Buttons (125x125px)
side by side will give you more ads, take up less space, and won't leave
a big block of blank space beside the ads. No Downside, Especially if
you style them like they are on:
https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AdFormats.html
Hit: The drop-down on the top is nice, and putting a userpage link in
there will make it possible for me to keep the userpage/talkpage links
on other wiki in my WikiSwitch.
Miss: You use the Username twice.
Welcome, Dantman! *Dantman*[#\/] - [Log out]
Take out one, and you have spare room for other things like [Switch
user] or custom links.
Welcome, *Dantman!*[#\/] - [Log out] - [Switch user]
Perhaps the menu could even be a mouse-over.
((Note: I didn't notice the Long message there till I went to central.
btw: Where is this message customized?))
Hit: The links at the top are nice, and customizing a set is nice to.
Miss: Something's bugged in the css. Half the time "Create an article"
fits, the other half the article drops down to the next line.... On the
Animepedia I'm on the Main Page, I hit edit and it drops down, I go back
to the article and it's still dropped down (Even though before then it
was fitting on that exact same page), then I hit the article link again
and it jumps back up to stay on one line. All the while, there's nothing
on the right to drop it down with my wide screen.
Suggestion: On the Special pages the "special" tab up top moves to the
left. How about keeping it in the right, and moving the Page Title into
the left of that bar.
Perhaps the margin between the title and the gold bar on normal pages
should be reduced to. To much white there.
Hit: YUI is a nice system to use. And in loading them, users could
probably use them to nicely improve on the existing scripts, and even
make more flashy methods for them.
Miss: You're loading the YUI stuff badly.
* You loaded utilities.js and animation.js even though animation.js is
one of the scripts compacted into utilities.js. And you're loading
animation.js instead of animation-min.js
* You're loading utilities.js and yahoo-dom-event.js even though the 3
things inside of yahoo-dom-event.js are already in utilities.js
* You're loading container-min.js and container_core-min.js even though
container_core is just a lighter version of container for those not
using all of the containers.
* You're loading the logger even though it's not something actively
used. Though, I'd forgive that, since in truth. The logger is a nice JS
debugging tool. I load it via Userscript on Wiki-Tools to help me iron
out things till they work.
* You're loading all these scripts from the local wiki instead of
loading them from the shared images server. That means more scripts are
loaded for the client, and Wikia's servers serve out the same script
again if the user goes to another wiki. When if they were loaded from
images.wikia.com like I remember many used to be then they would only be
loaded once between all Wikia wiki.
To summarize this is what you are loading:
/skins3/common/yui/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js
/skins3/common/yui/utilities/utilities.js
/skins3/common/yui/animation/animation.js
/skins3/common/yui/container/container-min.js
/skins3/common/yui/container/container_core-min.js
/skins3/common/yui/autocomplete/autocomplete-min.js
This is something like what you should be loading: (Note that of course
you'd use whatever directory you placed it in on images... or you could
do what I did when I created http://skins.wiki-tools.com, and have a
subdomain for shared skin/lib output. Though, I was considering moving
libs like yui to a new http://lib.wiki-tools.com once I got my overload
method finished.
http://images.wikia.com/skins3/common/yui/utilities/utilities.js
http://images.wikia.com/skins3/common/yui/container/container-min.js
http://images.wikia.com/skins3/common/yui/autocomplete/autocomplete-min.js
Do we see the problem here? The second one loads the exact same stuff
that the first one does. Except it's not double loading 3 scripts, and
it's not causing the Wikia servers to dish out duplicate scripts. If you
have issues with different extensions loading them independantly. Create
a YUILoader class, and call YUILoader->loadJS( 'utilities/utilities',
'container/container', 'autocomplete/autocomplete' ); or such... In
simple terms. Make it understand that utilities is the same as yahoo,
animation, dom, event, etc... And have it save a list of what it needs
to load. And when extensions load over half the needed scripts for
utilities or yahoo-dom-event load those scripts instead and remove the
others from the list. Also append -min.js to all the libraries except
utilities and yahoo-dom-event. Yahoo even has a JS loader, PHP is much
more robust you could easily create a better one in it.
Or, you could do this the lazy way... And load utilities, and all the
widget stuff that isn't part of the compacted stuff as -min.js then be
done with it cause you've loaded everything you'll ever need, and also
loaded the extra yahoo widgets that users can use to create their own
user js scripts. Like how I integrated YUI's tabs into MediaWiki on
Wiki-Tools (except it would be cleaner using ones already loaded instead
of loading via userscript).
Extension suggestion: Fix up the User style extension. If you agree that
it's a fair idea to give user's the ability to customize a stylesheet
for their own userspace/talkspace I would be happy to fix up the
extension to something usable on Wikia on the development server. If you
want a reason, compare:
http://www.wikia.com/index.php?title=User:Dantman&useskin=monobook to
http://www.wikia.com/index.php?title=User:Dantman&useskin=quartzslate
And think of how nice it would be for a user to customize the CSS of
their userspace instead of using the ugly WikiText hacks to colorize and
do strange things to the page.
As for the skin stuff... We can either load a skinname, or load a common
and a skinname, or we could load a common css page and introduce a new
"skin-....." into the body tag and allow for per skin css just like we
have per-page css.
Extension suggestion: The social bookmarking links at the bottom are
nice. It would be nice to have a set of messages and a parser hook that
would let us create links that will show up there.
For a quick example idea on how to do it. Take the Animepedia, there's a
anime encyclopedia called ANN which is nice to link to. It only does
summaries, but it's nice for side information that we wouldn't bother
listing. An example on how it would be setup to allow people to define a
link that should show up there:
==[[MediaWiki:Social links]]==
Format: * <name/id> <link-url> <image-url> <Hover Text>
* ann-anime http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=$1
http:// http://images.wikia.com/anime/en/x/xy/Someimage.png ANN Anime
And on an article, example 1825 is ANN's id for the Anime version of Naruto
<sociallink name="ann-anime">1825</sociallink>
Of course, you could just use social for the tag, or switch name with
type. As for the Numbers, in simple terms, the input text would be split
up by | and used to replace the numbers.
Of course, bearing that in mind, this example could have gone this way
using the same extension work.
* ann http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/{{lc:$1}}.php?id=$2
http:// http://images.wikia.com/anime/en/x/xy/Someimage.png ANN
{{ucfirst:$1}}
<sociallink name="ann">anime|1825</sociallink>
Then we wouldn't need to use 2 separate link types for the links.
However, that might or might not work depending on if you think that
there should be one link of each type, or the number of links should be
the same as the number of tags on the page.
Put V2 of the skins on the volunteer dev server, and I can fix half the
problems for you on my own in a few hours of my large amount of wasted
time having little to do.
Side note... That top menu might work pretty nice as a floated one. ^_^
You're already using YUI.
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of The Gaiapedia, Wikia Graphical Entertainment
Project, and Wiki-Tools.com
John Q wrote:
Hi,
The v2 skins are now available for you to try out in your skin
preferences. Look for QuartzSlate and QuartzSmoke... the naming is bit
awkward but when we introduce the color scheme chooser, there will be
only one skin (Quartz) and then a list of color schemes
(slate/smoke/custom/etc.).
Anyway, the v2 skins are available under your preferences. Also, when
using them, if you click on your user name at the top you'll see "manage
widgets" in the dropdown menu. You can take a look at the first few we
have... we'll be working on more of those and putting them in the
toolbar when they're available.
Also, as a preview, the social features are also live... go to your user
page and look for a "profile" link on the top article bar. We still have
some cleanup items on these that might take a day or two... if we find
something egregious, we'll most likely turn it off until we have it
figured out.
Thanks,
John Q.
_______________________________________________
Wikia-l mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
_______________________________________________
Wikia-l mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
