Forum:Portable Infoboxes — the return

Hey guys!

I was just stopping by to offer help on getting your infoboxes converted to the new, portable style. My bosses at Wikia have put me at your disposal, and we'd really like to try to finish up your infobox conversion over the next few days.

Back in August, you guys seemed to be pretty enthusiastic about changing over to new infoboxes, but there were several different thoughts about how to proceed.

To get the ball rolling again, the Russian OP wiki have converted their infoboxes, though they are of a slightly different design to what you use now. Take a look through their infoboxe infobox category. If we could put their infoboxes onto this wiki, and then style them after they're already here, we'd obviously save a lot of time.

The one exception to this may be Char Box, but one of our engineers came up with a new version of that one a while ago. We could easily integrate this new Char Box alongside the other infoboxes from RU, and have you mostly sorted by the beginning of next week.

So riddle me the answer to this basic question, if ya would: Could we just import the Russian boxes now so that you can have portability almost immediately, and then work together over the coming days to style them on the desktop more to your needs?

I've got many more questions for you guys, but this is the most important one for now! Thanks for your help! — CzechOut 07:04, February 25, 2016 (UTC)

Discussion
Well, this is inevitably going to descend into the people who want to improve the wiki arguing with the people who dislike change. Now, I may not like this, but it's better we change now than we wait until it's forced upon us. I'm in favour of changing.

15:40, February 25, 2016 (UTC)
 * My sense of the earlier discussion was that the community was in favour of changing to PIs. The question I have is whether you guys are okay with just using the Russian versions of these infoboxes (which are already created) to convert, and then just shaping the style post-conversion? — CzechOut 19:27, February 26, 2016 (UTC)

So I just took a brief look at the Russian versions, and I think I'm fine with importing them over to here, and then changing the style, since their infoboxes are similar enough to our current ones. I feel like with some tweaks, we can improve the infoboxes even more, and make them suit the wiki both on desktop and mobile even more. 21:40, February 26, 2016 (UTC)

Might as well change it now Roranoa Drake II (talk) 21:53, February 26, 2016 (UTC)

I just first want to apologize for the delay on dealing with this. It's been our fault, as we've really only had one editor capable of this kind of code-heavy editing, and he's been unable to be very active with us.

I don't think there should be much of a problem if we went with the Russian box. If people have a problem with them, we should change that AFTER the conversion process is complete. This is far too behind already. 19:31, February 27, 2016 (UTC)

I'm fine with simply converting the Russian ones. I'm afraid it would take too long if we designed them ourselves.. 12:33, February 28, 2016 (UTC)

Issues
So staff is making the change now, just opening this as a place for people to report any issues that may pop up. If there's none in a couple weeks after the transition, this should be closed. 05:57, March 15, 2016 (UTC)


 * Cover pictures for the latest chapters are missing, or even in the older chapters pictures are misplaced such as here: Chapter 39. -Adv193 (talk) 20:57, March 15, 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, a lot of chapters I've seen have the wrong cover image or the "NoPicAvailable" image. 11:45, March 16, 2016 (UTC)

Song boxes are having the same issue. It seems like it's happening to a bunch of different types of infobox, judging by the number of images showing up in Special:Unusedimages. 07:26, March 17, 2016 (UTC)

Characters that don't have infobox images are having the manga/anime switch show up with broken links (ex. 1 2) Also, previously if the romanized name section is removed, the name of the article would show up as the romanized name, but now it's gone entirely (for example Nekomamushi) 00:55, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

Maybe staff didn't move over our code for automated infoboxes? I'm not sure where the edits happened...

Also, a big problem is that color schemes aren't working at all. This seems like it could be fixed, as they work on the russian wiki. 02:53, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

Progress report

 * Hey guys :) As of this moment, your infoboxes are all converted. Thanks for bringing the above issues to my attention.  Let me go through them one by one.

Missing cover pictures
I'm not sure what is meant by the Chapter 39 issue. When I go to that page, I see an infobox image. Could you please clarify what's missing, as I don't know One Piece to a sufficient level of detail to see what's wrong there.

Redlinked images, largely in Char Box
I checked example infoboxes for every single template that I converted, and when I saw that the infoboxes had images, I converted the box. Obviously I couldn't check every single box. The thing is, before I even touched it, Char Box/doc said that the variable "image" was deprecated. This meant that the automated code which I brought over into the portable infoboxes from the original should have been handling all infobox images. It does so, as some of you may know, by looking for particular patterns in the file names. When it doesn't find those patterns, it puts up a "NoPicAvailable" image, or in the case of the Char Box, it delivers a broken links message, particularly if the  variable is set improperly. I didn't write that message, btw, but clearly the original author of that code meant for that message to display. In my view, there are two solutions to the problem:
 * Abandon the automated image selection
 * Fix the few boxes that are going wrong. Change the filenames of the misnamed images so that the template can read them. And make sure that all instances of Char Box actually have the right value for the   variable.

See, you don't really have that big of a problem. There are only 218 pages in Category:Pages with broken file links. Most of them can be cured just like Tomato Gang. If you add  to the infobox, the image pops right back up. And it's certain that not all the 218 pages actually have this problem.

I'd strongly suggest that you use the image redlinks as an opportunity to make sure all the Char Box instances are properly using  and that their images are named correctly.


 * Why is this happening now? Because I took whoever wrote the documentation at their word when they said the image variable was deprecated. And so I removed it.  With the "crutch" of the   variable now removed, other flaws are revealing themselves. Long term, the benefits are greater to fixing these 218 pages, and for everyone to be on the same page about how to edit the infoboxes properly.

Romanized name section in Char Box
The Romanized name was disappearing when there was no value, because the PI code really, strongly wants to make unfilled variables go away. So you have to do some coding to counteract that desire. I had originally brought over the exact code you guys used before, but that didn't work. It's now been fixed with a more robust bit of coding. Thanks for the heads up!

Color schemes
There are multiple aspects to this. On the one hand, you can affect the colors to a lot of things with infoboxes. But some of what you guys were doing before cannot be done with PIs. The main thing you can't do is to color a part of the infobox by inputting color values into an infobox. So there's no "on the fly" colouring.

You can set up themes that give unique colouring to different templates. For instance, compare Arc Box to Char Box. You will see a difference, and that comes from MediaWiki:Themes.css. There's also the possibility to make one Char Box look different from another Char Box. But you can't, again, do that from the infobox. You have to do it from MediaWiki:Themes.css. But no such settings have been made. That's something that's beyond what I was sent here to do, but if you're really interested, I can show you how to do one or two, and then you can take it from there on your own. But really, if you study MediaWiki:Themes.css, you should be able to see how it's done.

What I've tried to do is to leave you with boxes that are largely set up for more adventurous themes, but in fact have mostly similar styling. For instance, Crew Box has a theme of "PirateCrewDefaultColors" entered, but you'd have to add it to MediaWiki:Themes.css for it to work. Equally, it has a theme-source of "colorscheme", which you could enter to affect the styling of just one instance of a Crew Box infobox. Maybe you'd call that colorscheme "barber-pole" to indicate that it was red and white. But again, there is no pi-theme-barber-pole in Themes.css.

I've largely taken my cue from the Russian wiki, which actually does have most of its infoboxes exhibiting the same blue-and-white colouring that you see here. Your life will probably be a lot simpler if you choose to stick to the blue and white. However, I have tried to ensure, at least to the same degree that the Russian guys did, that you have the opportunity to do whatever you want! :) — CzechOut 03:58, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

The issue with unique color schemes are that we mainly used them on each Devil Fruit article. Now they're all the same which sucks. SeaTerror (talk) 05:26, March 18, 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, again, I think you could do that, but it wouldn't be up for me to actually do it. I don't know One Piece as a property well enough to hazard a guess as to which colors would be appropriate. What you guys would need to achieve these results is to figure out how to do one, and then replicate that success on each article that you think requires special colouring. — CzechOut 13:17, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

This is kind of minor but could you make it so that the automatically romanized names are in italics? Kaido King of the Beasts (talk) 13:57, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

You don't need to guess since the colors already existed before. SeaTerror (talk) 16:09, March 18, 2016 (UTC)