User:Steve-o/Sandbox
New nav template ideas
Larger navbox to put at bottom of pages, similar to wikipedia...
| 2007 Live-Action Movie franchise | |||
| |||
| Books | Prequel novel - coloring books - picture books - mix'n'match - young readers novel - novelization - a million other things | ||
| Comics | IDW Prequel comics - Comic adaptation - Target prequel comic | ||
| Video games | Console game - DS game | ||
| Online games | Alternate Reality Game - Other web-based games | ||
| Home games | A 3D card game - A 2D card game | ||
Needs drastic help to be non-terrible. We need to decide which things we actually want to link to from the template. The Wikipedia templates tend to link to lots of things, and if this is going on the bottom of a page, it can be large... So it's a question of how exhaustive to be. Linking to every last movie book article seems like too much, for example, but there's not a lot of middle ground between that or just having a single "books" link. Do we link to each relevant comic series, or just have a "comics" link? Etc., etc.. Here is a much more compact version which doesn't link to individual things from categories with multiple things:
| 2007 Live-Action Movie franchise |
| Toyline - Film - Books - Comics - Video games - Online games - Home games |
Personally I like that a lot better than the mammoth Wikipedia-style boxes, which I've always considered ugly. And in the particular case of the movie nav template, I'd kind of prefer to merge all the "games" things into a single link. Another article can list and link to the individual game articles.
Old nav template
Here's a little box that links to all aspects of a franchise. We could write one of these, custom, for each franchise and include them as templates in various places. At the very least, on the franchise, toyline, toon, and comic pages. Maybe also on individual issue or episode pages if there's a good place. This could work in concert with Derik's urhere template, which provides navigation within the fiction you're already looking at.
| Armada |
| Toyline |
| Cartoon |
| Comic |
Character boxes
I've started to doubt our early feeling that it would be impractical for us to have a standard "character" box to put on all the character pages. Here is some random thinking along those lines.
| Sunstreaker | |
| Hi. I'm better than you. | |
| Affiliations: | Autobot |
| Continuity family: | Generation 1 |
| Appears in: | Marvel G1, G1 cartoon, G1 Miscellania, Universe comic, BinalTech Asterisk, DW G1, IDW G1 |
| Alternate names: | Spinout (preliminary), Lince (Italian), Solo (French-Canadian) |
This could work, though that's a lot of code. And of course there's the question... what do we do when there's no picture? --M Sipher 01:34, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I would love, love to see your character box added to the Wiki. The one change I would strongly suggest is changing "Appears in", which for G1 multiverse staples would quickly turn into an unsightly mess (Optimus Prime. Appears in: Marvel Generation 1 and Generation 2, Sunbow Generation 1, Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers manga, The Transformer manga, Binaltech, Kiss Players, Headmasters... well you get the idea) with Era(s) (ala Wookiepedia). So for example:
Grimlock Era(s):
Generation 1 (Marvel, animated, Dreamwave, IDW) Generation 2 (Marvel) Beast Wars
I just strongly feel that would be a lot less unsightly than a string of continuities. --Rotty 06:59, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
- I worry that putting the silly quote in the vita stats box like that flagrantly invites it to be mistaken for an official motto. -Derik 07:05, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
- There's been some more discussion of these things at User:M Sipher/Sandbox.--KilMichaelMcC 07:16, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
- I worry that one mega-format ultimately doesn't serve the wide-and-varied needs of the wiki. I agree the 'just formatted text' approach we're using for everything now is clumsy, but it's also versatile.
- Maybe we should be looking at smaller bites- how to best present names, for instance. Maybe as standalone templates, maybe as smaller elements for a mega-box that's more flexible than the versions we're looking at now. -Derik 07:30, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
- There's been some more discussion of these things at User:M Sipher/Sandbox.--KilMichaelMcC 07:16, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
