Forum:Modernizing infoboxes

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Modernizing infoboxes

Well, it seems Fandom staffers have been noticing our lack of transitioning to portable infoboxes. Again, there are reason they haven't:

they haven't been reviewed for changes that are necessary to transition them properly without breaking stuff;
the portable infoboxes didn't have colour customization (not sure if they do now; I'll have to check).

I've put cleanup tags on the affected templates, which are:

I'm fairly certain that most of these only end up being forced into default colours and are actually all good to go, but I've undone the porting attempts for all of them just to be safe, especially since I'm not the one who made most of them. The tags say that they're undergoing review/modernization scheduled for next month (I guess "week" technically but who knows what's going to happen) but if anyone else wants to review the non-bolded (i.e. the ones that aren't really complex) right now, feel free! You could probably click on the history and use the revision by User:Yaujj75 as a reference, if you can read that stuff.

For me, this month hasn't been very productive for editing this wiki among other things, as I've been adjusting to a new job and doing some writing on the side. I plan to be more active here next week or so (hence the "scheduled for December 2018" message), and that's when I'll start reviewing these templates for transitioning to portable infoboxes. Evidently, it's been put off for way too long, haha. The bolded templates may end up being a little complicated depending on how much functionality the modern system has. Investigation and CaseData in particular will probably have to be merged into a multipurpose template like Place. There's a lot of discussion relevant to this in Forum:Notability of events and Forum:Episodes, cases, incidents. capefeather (talk) 02:57, November 26, 2018 (UTC)

Hello !

Actually, portable infoboxes are as flexible as the previous ones, if not more. You can do whatever you want with them, including choosing the color.

Need some help ?

(BTW, I'm not a Vanguard, but I can get in contact with some)

--Fire-Luigi (talk) 21:34, November 28, 2018 (UTC)

When they were first introduced, they didn't have much functionality in terms of being able to choose colours/themes of individual instances of a template. So I saw wikis that had multiple nearly identical infobox templates just to have different themes based on e.g. installment. I don't know if that's still the case these days.

Anyway, some of these aren't actually infobox templates, namely the evidence/profile boxes and Template:Puzzle. So we're left with the actual infoboxes:

capefeather (talk) 01:57, December 2, 2018 (UTC)

For reference, the last time portable infoboxes were discussed at length was on Forum:Infoboxes two years ago. That resulted in Template:Character being ported. That old thread reminded me of a lot of things involved with porting that template, including the fact that portable infoboxes apparently cannot have CSS elements specified individually, but must reference themes created on the MediaWiki CSS pages only editable by admins.

I suppose at this point the templates that still need porting can be divided into two categories:

Template:Country and Template:Place currently have the capability to change various colours on an individual level, which has been used to individualize some of the infoboxes. I'm not sure it's worth making a theme for every single infobox, especially if only an admin can do it, so my inclination is just to do away with that customization, but if someone wants to propose themes for certain categories of places/organizations, then they can do that, too.
Template:CaseData and Template:Investigation will probably be redone pretty much from the ground up. The way the former was themed has gotten really unwieldy and I really feel like changing the system to revolve around a smaller set of themes would do it a lot of good. I've had a system in mind and just never got around to it because of issues brought up in Forum:Notability of events and Forum:Episodes, cases, incidents. Since this was the ultimate endgame for those threads to begin with, I think any more discussion of these templates should go there.

capefeather (talk) 03:28, December 2, 2018 (UTC)

Anyway, looking at the structure of your template, I can guarantee all of them can be transposed into portable Infoboxes without any problem. :P Basically, you can do anything you want with the new code. It seems more restrictive in the first glance, but it really isn't.

You know, on my main wiki, we had the same issue, some years ago. However, portable infoboxes are very important because, you may not know but, more than 50% of Fandom viewers are using mobiles to navigate through the articles.

If you need help, let me know. I can try to do some things on a test wiki and show you what it looks like.

--Fire-Luigi (talk) 10:45, December 2, 2018 (UTC)

Is it possible to adjust the width of portable infoboxes? One concern I have is that, with the CaseData template, the episode posters for Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice looked very tiny on the episode pages for those games, since they have more width than height Bluebully (talk) 12:03, December 2, 2018 (UTC)

My knowledge on this stuff is based on Help:Infoboxes and Help:Infoboxes/CSS. I think you can do basically everything that we've been doing with the old templates, except it's done on theme definitions in MediaWiki:Wikia.css instead of the actual template pages. So it's just that, as far as I can tell, a non-admin can't just decide that it would be cool if an individual article's infobox had such-and-such colours without getting an admin to designate a theme for that one article. capefeather (talk) 23:49, December 2, 2018 (UTC)

I went through Help:Infoboxes/Tags and it seems format tags can be used to customize text formatting with template parameters, at least. capefeather (talk) 00:39, December 3, 2018 (UTC)