Forum:Transitioning to more mobile-friendly infoboxes

Hey Megami Tensei Wiki Community,

We’re reaching out to a few of our top communities, hoping you might adopt the migration to the new infobox markup. And we have tools to help.

Why we’re doing this

Simply put: Most current infobox structures translate very poorly to mobile devices, and indeed any device that doesn’t use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that more and more of our contributors visit Wikia from a mobile device.

To see just how much traffic has become mobile, you can check out this graph from our forum post about infoboxes a couple weeks back:



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 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, but we’re here to help with it, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future.

Tools we’ve designed to make the process easier

We've enabled two new features on your community. 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. This won't contain your previous CSS styling, though (assuming you've used any), and if you want the infoboxes to still look the same on desktop, you'll have to add it to Special:CSS instead of into the template, where it was before.

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.

This is our help page for the new markup. I'll also watch this post - so feel free to ask any questions you have about this, and of course any questions other community members might have!

In the case of Megami Tensei Wikia, the amount of infoboxes per page is pretty low, so updating the templates won't be too arduous of a process. I'm well-versed in the entire conversion process and will gladly take part in bringing about this change. I'd love to hear the take of all of the active adminbase, as well as major contributors. Please leave your thoughts, opinions, or any questions below. Thank you all! TheBlueRogue •(profile)•(talk)•(doug@wikia-inc.com) 18:33, August 28, 2015 (UTC)