Nicereddy 109 Share Posted February 1, 2015 Soeb and I have been secretly working on a new skin for the wiki, and I figured I'd update you guys on our progress. Here's a beautiful in-dev screenshot I took: Note that this skin is still in Early Accessâ„¢, so there are some bugs I need to work out before I'm done. (Don't do gradients, kids. They're bad for you.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andytizer 269 Share Posted February 1, 2015 This is very interesting! Some things to consider- integration with IP Board as it currently stands, or IP Board 4 responsiveness onto tablet/smartphone social - we were thinking of switching the privacy-invasive iframes for static buttons, but they still need a place somewhere is it possible to add new tabs? I'm thinking it would be nice to add new functionality, e.g. Controls:Game - might show all default controls for that game Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted February 1, 2015 And here's the non-joking version: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted February 1, 2015 This is very interesting! Some things to consider- integration with IP Board as it currently stands, or IP Board 4 responsiveness onto tablet/smartphone social - we were thinking of switching the privacy-invasive iframes for static buttons, but they still need a place somewhere is it possible to add new tabs? I'm thinking it would be nice to add new functionality, e.g. Controls:Game - might show all default controls for that game I'll need to give some thought as to where we should put the IPBoard integration as I can definitely see it's usefulness. I think we may want to try parsing the forums ourselves, since IPBoard loads about as quickly as molasses and would really clash with the skin. iframes are the devil, so if we can avoid those that would be vastly preferable. I'm currently planning on placing the social icons in the footer, since they serve the same purpose as the social buttons without compromising our design or slowing down page load (based on tests Soeb and I have done, Twitter and Facebook seem to be the primary causes for our slow loading times). Hopefully I can get your blessing on that, since I think the benefits are fairly significant. I've worked to make it responsive (the sidebar hides once you get below a certain browser window width, among some other changes), but right now I think it'd be best to just let the MobileFrontend extension handle that. As for the tabs, that's outside my domain. Soeb or Garrett will likely be able to better answer that. Mirh 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrett 214 Share Posted February 1, 2015 is it possible to add new tabs? I'm thinking it would be nice to add new functionality, e.g. Controls:Game - might show all default controls for that game MediaWiki has no native capability for awareness of additional associated namespaces. I think that would require a custom extension to avoid resorting to really nasty hacks in the skin. An alternate solution would be to use subpages, linking to those pages through links or templates in the content area rather than as part of the skin. Your example of controls seems like it would be veering too much into the territory of a game guide. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted March 2, 2015 Here's the current version, for those interested. Very much unfinished, but feel free to give feedback. [compimg]https://i.imgur.com/7DhWqG6.png|https://i.imgur.com/a6kJqoY.png|800|450|Before|After[/compimg] Pridit and ThatOneReaper 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted March 3, 2015 After doing some initial tests, I tried loading the Half-Life 2 article on both the production and dev wikis for comparison. Note that there are a few variables that will effect this, namely advertisements (none on either since I was logged in) and the IPBoard integration on the production wiki. We currently intend to only show recent replies on the home page once we finish this up, more on that when we actually make it happen :P Anyway, here's the data: Production wiki: 90 requests, 479 KB transferred Development wiki: 47 requests, 392 KB transferred So we've managed to cut a little over 85 KB of data from the page load and almost halved the requests. In theory this should make our servers withstand larger influxes of traffic (emphasis on in theory, I am not a network engineer). I'm not sure where else we can optimize it, most of the weight is currently from the cover photo and game screenshots (my icons are all incredibly small because they're SVGs :D). I'll have to work with Soeb to see if we can get longer lasting caching of things like our logo image, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrett 214 Share Posted March 3, 2015 I like the new look so far. The left side seems like it has too much wasted space now (as I mentioned to Soeb on IRC) but it's actually the same width as on the current skin. Note that MediaWiki renders SVG as PNG rather than using the SVG file directly, so only SVG files that are part of the skin will actually be loaded as SVG. EDIT: maybe the footer should include a mini disclaimer about affiliates (like IsThereAnyDeal.com and elsewhere) since so many of the stores covered on the wiki now have affiliate tags applied. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThatOneReaper 51 Share Posted March 17, 2015 Random question: Would the new skin support different colour schemes? If so, adding various colour schemes would be a cool idea (ex. Original Steam format, Terminal look, etc.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andytizer 269 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I am super impressed with the progress on the skin, kudos guys. Initially I added a 'link' to each H2 - this is a bit hackish as it uses javascript. Also it's not a good solution as it is 'inside' the H2 tag which isn't great semantically. I noticed the new Wikipedia version has a cool 'hover' link where a link appears when you mouseover the H2. I wonder if we can do something comparable to that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted March 20, 2015 Random question: Would the new skin support different colour schemes? If so, adding various colour schemes would be a cool idea (ex. Original Steam format, Terminal look, etc.) In theory you could do it with personal CSS styles, but they wouldn't be official. I am super impressed with the progress on the skin, kudos guys. Initially I added a 'link' to each H2 - this is a bit hackish as it uses javascript. Also it's not a good solution as it is 'inside' the H2 tag which isn't great semantically. I noticed the new Wikipedia version has a cool 'hover' link where a link appears when you mouseover the H2. I wonder if we can do something comparable to that? I liked that when I noticed it as well. I want to add it, but I'm not sure if it'd be weird should the floating ToC happen to float over the link icon as the user hovers. Probably not a huge problem, so I'd be willing to implement it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted March 20, 2015 @ThatOneReaper if you'd like a personal custom color scheme, I can help set up a quick little CSS template to get you going. I'm just not too keen on officially supporting them, since that'd just create more stuff to keep updated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicereddy 109 Author Share Posted March 20, 2015 @Garrett: would it be possible to modify the way the Stub/Cleanup/Development tags work? I'm having a problem where the tags have different styles depending on what tag they are, which is rather annoying. Case in point: http://dev.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_V Using both a Stub and Cleanup tag causes a space between the two that I can't fix without merging the templates into one single div. Something like this would be nice: {{Notice|Stub|Cleanup}} Although we should probably ask the community to make sure we get all the edge cases taken care of. I also wanted to get everyone's thoughts on using white for the stub/cleanup icons vs. keeping them as they are? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrett 214 Share Posted March 20, 2015 Some CSS change seem to be the source of the problem. Those templates don't have that issue on the old skin. It would be better to fix it in the CSS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pridit 39 Share Posted March 22, 2015 This is really, really good I'm absolutely loving the new design. I assume all the font and such is placeholder? The navigation bar at the top would definitely need to be changed to be a bit easier on the eyes and the stub/cleanup icons could be reduced in size to be inline with the text but aside from that it's very clean and organized. I absolutely look forward to seeing this progress further. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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