Hey DanTMan,
As always, thanks for taking the time to digest this stuff and compose
your initial feedback. Driving the design were two major factors:
reducing the size of the sidebar and creating a skin that feels like
an evolution of monobook. To meet the "monobook evolution" design
goal, and to make the skin far easier to customize than Quartz, V3
uses far less accent and structural images.
The navigation is customizable via a MediaWiki article, using bulleted
list markup:
*Muppet Wiki
*Muppet Characters
**Kermit the Frog
**Miss Piggy
**Other Characters
***Gonzo
***Animal
etc.
I just put the finishing CSS touches on the navigation menu this week
for users without JS. It looks and works really nice. In fact, we even
experimented with a CSS-only version of the navigation menu, but it
was completely unforgiving if your mouse slipped off one of the child
menus even for a split second. In the end, the menu is rendered with
YUI for the JS-having folks.
-Christian
On Dec 21, 2007, at 8:35 PM, DanTMan wrote:
*sigh* Bu-bye nice quartz look... I kinda liked a bit of the V2
quartz... (T_T And goodbye Quartz Switch setup... I'm going to have to
rewrite the way the buttons are put in and styled)
How about integration of the styled look of quartz with the
monobook/quartz(V3) layout.
Here are some of my ideas:
* Returning the curved header to the skin:
** Could try raising that logo area a bit higher (It looks even more
space consuming than in V2).
** Rather than on the right, the curve could be on the left and be
used
to make the logo part of the top bar.
*** This would also provide the extra benefit of a flat background so
that transparent logos don't end up unreadable because of gradients in
the real bg).
*** If people still wanted the logo to show up against the background
all they'd need to do is remove/not-include the header image, as the
top
bar would use the current markup based background displayed. In that
way
both of the liked versions are kept available.
* The curved look to some areas of the skin:
** The Article_bars type image could actually be returned to the top
of
the Article area. It should work with that mockup without causing
issues
in reading.
** The previous suggestions I made on how to reintegrate the bottom
Article_bars into the V2 Quartz Article area could also apply to the
V3
skin.
** The Search bar at the top of the sidebar could be given the
Article_bars style to.
** A curve (Not really the article bars style) could be added to the
very bottom of the Sidebar (The related communities box, or if that's
not always it, the bottom box could always be given a .last css class)
*** Overall, rather than giving the sidebar boxes each curves, this
would give the entire sidebar a more unified curve to it.
Primarily, I think the outcry against Quartz with people wanting
Monobook was layout, not style. It should be possible to integrate the
monobook layout, with a bit of the fancy styling of quartz.
Though I do have a thought about that bar at the bottom of the page
with
the repeat spotlight ads.
You ever seen one of those sites with a list which rolled from
right-to-left with a bunch of affiliate buttons to a bunch of
topsite lists.
Rather than something ugly of course...
How about letting us list, (In a MW message) a number of wikia which
are
similar/related/affiliated with the wikia you're on. And inside that
box
at the bottom, they'll roll from right-to-left. Basically it'll be a
logo image with a link to the wiki.
Also, the sidebar is nice. Looks like we're using a custom MediaWiki
message to create that one?
I could make a suggestion...
Just for the users without JS. This time could we add in a little
extra
css styling to style it nicely with CSS, then turn it into a hover
menu
with JS after so we know that we're not going to make it unusable to
those without JS.
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of:
-The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com)
-Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG)
-and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)
JohnQ wrote:
I hate it when that happens. :) Screenshots attached.
Hi everyone,
I have what may be an early "Winter holidays" present for many of
you...
We've been working on a new look for Wikia based on both the
positive
and negative feedback we've gotten on the V1 and V2 skins. We know
the effort it takes for you to adjust to these skins but we think
we've hit the right balance based on all the feedback. To recap, the
biggest criticisms we received were:
* don't push the article too far down the page (V1)
* the right-hand sidebar is too wide (V1/V2)
* we want something more like Monobook (V1/V2)
With that input, we built a V3 that we believe addresses your
concerns while still including the things that will help us grow the
site:
* a left-hand sidebar
* a wider article space
* more like Monobook
* incorporate the features from V2 that are working
* browsing behavior via top content and the more prominent
search box are up (V2).
* search suggest is useful for visitors (~30% of all searches
use it... on some wikis 70%).
* we still believe giving the community more visibility is the
right thing to do.
In doing this, however, we had to make one big trade-off. The only
way to reduce the width of the right sidebar was to remove our best
performing ad size (some of the ad networks will only buy that
size).
So... we need you to understand that the box ad format is good for
the long-term health of Wikia and, while taking it off 99.99% of
pages, we don't want to get rid of it entirely but rather only show
it on the main page of each wiki since that one page still gets a
decent amount of traffic. This is shown as a "featured media" box on
one of the mockups.
I'm including some mockups that show you what we've been working on.
In addition, there's a new forum topic on it here:
http://inside.wikia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=141
Thanks,
John Q.
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