Forum:SH:Portable Infoboxes

Hi everyone. I'm Tim Quievryn, the Director of Technical Support at Wikia. I'm personally reaching out to the Wookieepedia team to talk to you about the new infobox markup known as Portable Infoboxes and the tools we have to help with the transition. Before getting into that, I want to take a moment to share with you the "Why?" of this process.

Why are infoboxes changing to Portable Infoboxes?

Put simply, most current infobox templates across Wikia translate very poorly to mobile experiences, and indeed any device that doesn't use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that traffic across Wikia, including on Wookieepedia, is trending towards mobile. There is an important graph from our Community Central forum post about infoboxes a couple weeks back, and I want to share it here as well, because it shows just how big the trend towards Mobile is:



Mobile is the future. Not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic - it's staggering.

We partnered with the Wikia community to create this new Portable Infobox markup to make sure that your hard work can be displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) easily and without any new coding conventions. It’ll take some effort up front, to be sure, but we’re here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future. I know how important mobile has become to the community here, particularly the Wookieepedia app, and this change will pay big dividends for your mobile audience.

Tools we’ve designed to ease the process

We’ve introduced two new features to help with the conversion. One is a tool for migrating the “old” infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your wikia that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the “Generate draft markup” button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup.

The second is a new feature on Special:Insights that will highlight which infoboxes on your wikia have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. It’s fairly intuitive - you can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the “Convert!” button on the right, which performs the same action as the “Generate draft markup” button.

Likely the most work that will need to be done on Wookieepedia is Monobook styling. This is not designed with Monobook in mind, but Monobook will work with these new infoboxes if you update your CSS with additions for the new infobox classes.

Star Wars Fanon is one community that has already adopted Portable Infoboxes. I know the infoboxes there match the ones you have here. Here’s a great example of the new infobox in action.

This is our help page for the new markup. If you would like, I can help get things rolling by converting a template or two as an example if you want as well as watching this forum post for any questions. --DaNASCAT (help forum | blog) 00:24, July 29, 2015 (UTC)