Board Thread:News and Information/@comment-26143371-20170304235143

Hi everyone,

a long time ago (August 2015) I started working on creating new infoboxes for this wiki. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a box in the upper right corner of many articles and summarizes the most important information of the page.

This has mainly been inspired by the fact that our current Template:Infobox is very generic and somewhat unpleasant to use. The new infoboxes are now specific to one type of game element (e.g. questline, character, building). As such we don't have to specify row titles anymore and a consistent row ordering is enforced.

They are implemented with Wikia's Fandom's Portable Infobox feature (see Help:Infoboxes and w:c:p:Infoboxes). This means they integrate better with the mobile skin and the Android App. In the future we might even get the possibility to access information stored in them programmatically. Basically that would allow us to generate pages like the game content list with minimal effort and have them update automatically (w:c:connect:Content Understanding and Contributions: Possibilities for the future).

The new infoboxes have been dormant for a while now. But recently I've done some more work and I think it's time to get them to a usable state. I'm now at a point where I think it is best to get some feedback. You can take a look at what I've done su far by visiting User:NoWayThisUsernameIsAlreadyOwnedBySomeone/Sandbox.

There are two main points where multiple eyes/opinions would be good: If you don't like any of these options, you can of course come up with your own ideas. Simply create an image with Paint/GIMP/your favourite image editing software. Or you can even draw something by hand and upload a photo of it. None of the themes are final, the self-made ones are simply some quick mock-ups. In order to get to a final version we must first decide on one of them. When that is done I will enable the chosen design so that everyone can see it in more detail. Then further tweaks can be made to improve it.
 * 1) Completeness: I think I've covered most of the current usages of Template:Infobox, but of course I can't say for sure. If you know of an page that doesn't fit any of the new infobox-types please say so. Also let me know if you notice one of the new infoboxes is missing some vital row of information.
 * 2) Design: The infoboxes currently use the default theme which is quiet basic and not really related to TSTO at all. They can however be styled differently. I've done a set of different styles (see gallery below). The first one shows the current default style that you can see in the actual infoboxes on my sandbox. The second is based on how menus look in TSTO. The third one is a Simpsons-like yellow theme. The forth theme is called "Europa" and is an alternative theme provided by Wikia. For reference I've also added a screenshot of the design currently used on the old Template:Infobox.

Once we're happy with the way the new infoboxes behave and look, I will move them to the template namespace and add some documentation. From then on new pages should no longer use Template:Infobox. Old pages can be migrated whenever they are edited anyway (e.g. limited-time itmes that get re-released) or when someone just feels like doing that. To avoid having two sets of completely different looking infoboxes on pages, I will migrate the old Template:Infobox to the new format. 