DanTMan.... always a pleasure. :) comments in-line...
DanTMan wrote: > 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. Actually, we had planned to make the widget boxes without curves... but we wanted to focus on getting this out so people could use it. We're going to have things to fix, undoubtedly, so we'll be working in that style change as we go. > 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. Actually, we haven't *officially* released the WidgetDashboard... but I'm thinking a link to it will be in the username drop down on the top line. I think what you're suggesting is the ability to create more than one dashboard... right now there's one per user, just like one user page, one user talk page, one user profile page, and then one user dashboard page. I can see how you'd fill it up in about 8ms... :) ... let me think about how that would work and see what people want as we roll out more. > 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...) Interesting... I have a few thoughts on how to get people more choice there... let me get this out there and working then we can discuss. > 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. They will be... Inez did that and he usually sends everything through the system messages... so that will get fixed... thanks for spotting it. He's sleeping right now... but when I wake him up in an hour, he can start with that. :) > 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. Yep, I know... we get that info from the API... I pointed that out and got a reason that I can't remember right now... but I just talked to YuriK in the hallway here and he said we should be able to get whatever we need there through the API... so that should get better soon. > Miss: You forgot to filter bot edits from the Widget. Irrelevant or en > masse edits show up in the widget causing confusion. We get this via the MediaWiki API ... I'll defer to the people pulling the data there. > 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?! Heh... ok, have to admit I didn't think about it from a round number point of view. 130x150 (pretty standard wiki logo size) = 260x75. I think when I did this number a while ago... and I have to admit I don't remember off-hand where I got the 133x150 which turned into 266x75. We are actually thinking to make that area dynamic so that if the logo ends before 266 then the header links move left allowing lnoger links for the custom header links... but I wanted people to see how much space they *have* before starting to deal with dynamic spacing there. > 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) Yeah, this was me and a bot I wrote between 4am and 6am yesterday. The idea was just to get something in there for the first day... I expect most people will want to replace this anyway. I'll look into running the bot again and putting white around the text with imagemagick and make the bkd invisible. Need sleep first (and fixing anything broken will come first). > 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 Actually, I did a mockup with two 125 x 125's ... but actually the word is that no one really buys those sizes, so 180x150 was there already from the previous version. Having the two half banner's is not a bad idea... but 99% of the list is groaning at you now. :) > 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?)) Actually, on our test wiki ... fp012.qa.wikia.com... it looks the way you suggest. I'll have Emil take a look. Will ask the designer about mouse-over vs. click drop-down. > 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. Ok... we need to take a look at that. Any consistency in the behavior you can figure out before we get there would be appreciated. > 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. Will take a look. > 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 :) I'll follow up with Inez. We actually are going to be consolidating a lot of the separate js files into one to reduce back-and-forths... and Yahoo just released a new version of YUI a couple of days ago that only loads the elements needed on a particular page. We're not going to upgrade to that until this release has settled, though. > * 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. Yes, it's being loaded for debugging purposes. All of this stuff is new enough that we'll need that there for a while yet. I'll ask Inez about the lib overlap and see. > * 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. Yes, they'll be loaded from images... Emil noticed this late last night. That will be changed shortly. > > 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). > > Ditto with above. I need to have Inez take a look. :) > 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. Yes, Emil was taking a look at this just a few hours ago... it's a bug that it's not getting included... but I think there might be a caching issue through our squids going on there as well. We'll get that going as soon as we can. > > 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. Yes, we need to make this customizable for other countries/languages anyway since their social bookmarking links are different. First goal was get this out there to play with. > > > 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. Ok, DanTMan.... good stuff. John Q. > > ~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 > _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
