User blog:Kirkland22/Infoboxes

Some of you might notice that the infobox templates at the top right corner of articles are starting to look a little different than they used to. This blog post will explain why.

IN SHORT: Infobox templates have been migrated from their old coding to the new portable coding in order to be compatible with all Internet-capable devices (including mobile phones).



What has changed?
When I undertook this project a couple weeks ago, I made it my goal to keep our infoboxes very close in format/style to the old infoboxes. This required extensive trial & error as well as a lot of learning because I have no background in CSS coding and only knew enough to get by.

All of the original content is still there. This includes not just the information on the infoboxes, but also most of the colors and fonts. I added a few new colors so that each infobox would have its own color. The style is a little different (particularly the bolder-than-usual outlines), but I personally like the new look better. Please voice any complaints below in the comments if you have any.

Inevitably, some manual resizing of images will have to be done on certain articles, because they will appear too large. This is an easy-enough fix, and doesn't apply to very many articles.

What do they look like now?
Check them out! I've provided links to them below (there are 12 total). They are present on about 60% of articles on the Ed, Edd n Eddy Wiki so you are very likely to see one just by clicking on a Random page.

Template:GrimKND

Template:Movie

Template:Scam

Template:Machine

Template:Game

Template:Place

Template:Character

Template:Person

Template:Invaded

Template:Media

Template:Mis-Edventure

Template:Episode

How can these infoboxes be edited in the future?
Part of the reason this project has been so complicated is because one must go through three different pages in order to get an infobox template to work.

The first is the admin-only MediaWiki.Wikia.css, which is the style sheet for the wiki using CSS code. The templates would have a lifeless default configuration if the material on this page didn't exist. This is where the colors, borders, wrapping, text alignment, etc. can be handled.

The second is the template page, which would include one of the ones I linked to in the list above. In this page, the XML infobox markup is present and can be edited by any registered user (some of them are protected, however). It controls the different data points, headings and groups.

The third is, of course, the article itself, where the infobox can be placed using the tag, and data points can be separated with the | character.

Because many of these pages can be accessed only by admins, you would be better off asking for assistance on my talk page or one of the other admins.

Trivia

 * The hex color code for the light gray background of the infobox templates is #ededed. I stumbled across this and new it had to be ours at the Ed, Edd n Eddy Wiki.