MediaWiki talk:Sidebar

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Proposed change to navigation and main page

a reorganisation of the nav panel, incorporating certain elements from the main page to enhance navigation for casual users and free up realestate at top of main page

77stephen (talk) 13:54, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

remove

    • Art (add portal - implied by cultural products suggestions added 19:43, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Organizations (add portal suggested 17:32, 17 August 2020 (UTC))

suggest these two ideas be moved to the inhabitants portal and a modest restructure to that page to keep main nav list manageably short 77stephen (talk) 03:55, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Comments

Looks good to me, 77stephen. Thanks for thinking big. --Fleanetha (talk) 15:49, 15 August 2020 (UTC)


Thanks Fleanetha. I'd like to add an additional submenu for "Inhabitants" under the golarion heading (which in turn might need a slightly broader heading such as World of Golarion - to include a broader solar system / planar view)

Unfortunately we don't have a portal for inhabitants - closest things we have are (of which I'm aware):

Does it make sense to create one? 77stephen (talk) 02:45, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

I like the idea of a new portal as both the pages you reference have validity (though both are very 1E-oriented currently), and one on its own is not sufficient for a comprehensive overview. There's also the detailed Inhabitants category tree to reference: Category:Inhabitants where we can offer new ways to search as on, say, the Religion portal in the 'Find a deity' subportal. It also begs the question whether a separate 'Monsters' portal might be a good idea too, rather than trying to cram it into a general Inhabitants one, as it is a large area of the wiki in its own right.
Re the off-Golarion comment, maybe add instead a new link from the sidebar to Great Beyond to cover access to the multiverse? --Fleanetha (talk) 11:13, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Thinking more broadly about the 'big' topics in the wiki, 'Organisations' may merit a portal too, as Paizo has published many books about them. Bar the category structure, though, I can't think of pages in the wiki currently that could be used within that portal as the individual organisations tend to be quite discrete. That doesn't invalidate the idea though. --Fleanetha (talk) 11:13, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
sorry I forgot to indent in my first reply, added notes to the layout proposal to try and keep all proposed changes clear and together - I'm also proposing an deeper indent in the nav menu - makinig the great beyond a sub of the geography sub since it is primarily about place/location - but I don't know and can't test if this will even work. Alternatively we could expand the geography portal to include a link to the Great Beyond to encapsulate the same idea.
love the organisations portal idea. I think monsters should be included in inhabitants though - Paizo shifts those definitions for each species or ancestry seemingly with each new release so I think the concept is more fluid and will probably be moving towards more of that nuance given trends in gaming and the community.
I think I've been waiting a bit for a more official go-ahead up until now - should I go ahead and start making the new portals or is that premature? 77stephen (talk) 17:32, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Be bold --Fleanetha (talk) 18:29, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
So this ventures off-topic but I got it into my head that Category:Flora and Category:Fauna belong in the inhabitants portal, but they are categories below Category:nature in our current structure, but this includes Category:Minerals which i would not include under inhabitants - perhaps add an ecology portal as well?
what about a cultural products portal for things such as List of visual artworks and List of written works (and others)?
- another issue is that Category:nature is now pulling in primal magic tradition from 2e due to the nature skill - I'm sure an unintended consequence of the nature category - i have added this idea to the nature talk page 77stephen (talk) 15:25, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
I suggest limiting "inhabitants" to sapient creatures and those non-sapient creatures that are nevertheless identifiable by name rather than descriptor. Dog would not go in Inhabitants, but Taldogis would.—Paizo Publishing, LLC.png Yoda8myhead (talk) 23:47, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
added some reworking of the ideas as an option in the nav panel proposal above - add art portal, move great beyond and create a portal for it.
I also feel like the tools menu should be removed from the nav panel rolled up to the user's personal context or "more" menu - not all users can use all these tools - and those that are technically general have very limited appeal to a casual user - "what links here" is probably the most useful to a casual user- giving them another avenue to surf through content that may be relevant to them, whereas "upload files" requires edit privileges, "special pages" and "recent changes" are of lower value not likely to get any non data nerds interested since they do not take the casual user's context into account the will likely be irrelevant to them. I've put some proposed changes above 77stephen (talk) 19:43, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't want to see the end of the top three tools as they are used a lot and need to be readily accessible. There's enough room for them. Help is not needed on the left sidebar, though, as there's a full help section at the top --Fleanetha (talk) 11:16, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
is there a way to make the menu collapse or be display based on user - tools seem very useful to admin (who use the site often and should remain supported) but it's not helpful to an average user. if not, leaving it in is fine i suppose but as a user when I see tools I expect them to be useful and these are not for most site visitors.—This unsigned post was made by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]]. Please sign all posts with ~~~~. sorry 77stephen (talk)
I don't think so.—Paizo Publishing, LLC.png Yoda8myhead (talk) 23:47, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
made some changes to the proposal above based on discussion 77stephen (talk) 03:55, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
re: Help:Contents|Help, it's in this list to make it show up in the sidebar nav on mobile. The default skin's CSS hides it from the sidebar in non-mobile viewports because it appears in the skin-specific top nav. If you remove it, the Help won't be linked to on mobile and probably not in other skins either.
Also, if the portals are going to be given a higher profile by being made visible on every page, they should likely be maintained better, or fundamentally redesigned in ways to reduce the need to manually maintain them. For example:
  • Portal:Religion has been for years consistently one of the most trafficked pages on the wiki (or the most trafficked), but the Find a Deity section hasn't been updated since 2017, and User:Fleanetha is the only active user who's kept the lists up to date since 2016. It also relies on 1E categorization and terms; does it need to be reorganized to better conform to 2E?
  • Portal:Sourcebooks as it's built now needs constant maintenance but has been out of date since at least July 2019; I put some work into Portal:Accessories to reuse list content from product line navboxes, which might be an example of how to streamline some of that work.
  • Portal:Geography hasn't been updated since 2015, and 2E setting changes require updating or redesigning it.
It's not a bad thing to elevate the portals' prominence and draw attention to these issues as a result, but these are worth minding as part of the process. -Oznogon (talk) 05:16, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
(Also if you add 16 items + headings to the sidebar, you're going to vertically overflow most desktop monitors, which will add a scrollbar to the sidebar. If you go this route, please test on various viewports.) -Oznogon (talk) 05:23, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
wise words as ever - many thanks for the advice and for the help to avoid missteps, Oznogon. --Fleanetha (talk) 12:47, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
no disagreement. I updated the sourcebook page but without updating to the accessories format, which does seem lower maintenance. I now intend to do a major overhaul of the product portals as well as update and reorganize the nav panels.... this will take a fair piece of time of course. 77stephen (talk) 22:16, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

terminology

while I continue to have thoughts on reorganizing the structure of the navigation, I wonder if it makes sense to use more common terminology particularly in a nav panel. Inhabitants is certainly not going to be a common search term, nor will it make immediate sense to as many individuals as terms like creatures, people, or monsters. if we want to rank prominently or simply be more approachable and understandable to the widest audience using short and more common terms seems appropriate. 77stephen (talk) 16:21, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Clutter

Keep in mind that this panel shows up as a default part of the skin on all pages, and the more lines we add to it, the more cumbersome it is likely to become. Especially on mobile devices. Not every portal needs to be here, nor does every top-level category in the category tree. I also believe we should maintain the Tools section, as burying the tools editors and admins need to use to do their jobs will not encourage others to edit or take on admin duties, and that is not in the wiki's best interest. I don't think, for example, that we need to link to Art on every page of the wiki, meta-pages included. And by Abadar's beard, if we're going to have lists of things, put them in alphabetical order (Geography, History, Inhabitants, Magic, Organizations, Planes, Religion)! Oh yeah, and rename "The Great Beyond" to be "Planes", as it means something to people who don't already know our setting and its name for the multiverse. And probably make all these portals before we link to them on every page. :-) —Paizo Publishing, LLC.png Yoda8myhead (talk) 23:47, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

100% agree that the portals need to be made before moving forward - was not too concerned about alpha order at this stage and I was thinking it might make sense to have them be tiered sub-menus and trying to find a balance between too many list items and navigation (hence the questions about context sensitivity for the menu or roll-up) 77stephen (talk) 03:55, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Portals drafted

So I've finally finished the Planes portal which was the last one not completed on the proposed changes list. Please take a look and let me know if you see anything glaring or if anything needs to be done prior to the nav changes going live. 77stephen (talk) 04:18, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Looks good to me, 77stephen. Excellent work. I particularly like the hyperlinked solar system map. I made a few cosmetic tweaks which I hope are for obvious reasons but do revert if that's not what you want. One comment is that I wonder if we'd be better to redirect to the page of a subject rather than the category page? Category pages are not very friendly. --Fleanetha (talk) 19:32, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
your changes all seem both minor and universally to be improvements so no issues from me, as for the category vs page ... I'm not sure to be honest- I generally was coping the format of pre-existing portal pages.
at this point I'd love to see the nav changes go up and then discuss improving all portal pages in unison if you don't think it's too big a problem as is. 77stephen (talk) 22:37, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
I'm happy - let me know if you need any help with that. --Fleanetha (talk) 16:05, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
So what still needs to happen for the new navigation to go live? 77stephen (talk) 17:11, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
Can you edit MediaWiki:Sidebar? If so, promote your changes there so we can get a feel for what it looks like on screens and mobiles. Let me know otherwise. --Fleanetha (talk) 18:06, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
No. I'm not able to make any changes to the sidebar directly.77stephen (talk) 21:30, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
I've promoted your work then into the sidebar; thanks for doing this. I have no idea why 'History' is appearing as 'Page history' but, apart from that, it all seems to work nicely. Have a play and see what you think. Maybe others will comment too. --Fleanetha (talk) 22:41, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
Tested on my computer screen (Firefox) and on my iPhone and it all seems to work bar History coming up as 'Page history'. --Fleanetha (talk) 22:53, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
Botched it to work - it now makes sense, if not in a consistent format with the other portals, as 'History of Golarion' rather than as 'Page history'. Some deeper coding was at work that is beyond me. If anyone knows, please speak up. --Fleanetha (talk) 22:57, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
your most recent edit seems to have corrected the display of "page history". works well across firefox, chrome, edge and on my pixel2 xl chrome and firefox mobile browsers. thanks for pushing it live. 77stephen (talk) 23:05, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
Eventually, found a way to add back the missing Community portal too: didn't seem to want to link it when it is in a header. --Fleanetha (talk) 13:18, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

The PayPal donate link results in an error. -Oznogon (talk) 21:34, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

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