Hi everyone.
In the short time I’ve been on wikiHow I’ve noticed that there’s some issues with UIBs and templates in general, so I’ve used some of my knowledge of HTML and CSS styling to create a few test templates and UIBs to try and see if we can fix this up a bit, along with @EpcotMagic
, who has done some great work responsifying existing templates that you’ve probably noticed in RC patrol.
Please have a look at my sandbox here
. There’s some info there on what I’ve changed and issues I’ve found.
Personally, I think the results are pretty good and the UIBs look a lot better than they did before, but I’m open to feedback and collaboration:)
Once we’ve made the UIBs look a little nicer, I think we should consider addressing the UIB tower templates, as these define how the UIBs display and are the majority of the problem.
Perhaps, for consistency, we could impose a limit on characters on all UIBs to make sure they’re all the same size, as larger UIBs tend to ruin UIB towers displaying properly and what not.
Anyway, please have a look at my sandbox and let me know what you think:)
@JayneG
, I can’t seem to find the name to the template page for the tower I’m using, but it was mentioned as standard wikitable on https://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Make-Userboxes-Line-Up-Neatly
(Method 1 Step 1). I’m using that method because when you have so many UIBs, you need to store at least 2 UIBs on each row and all the other methods make the table because pretty sloppy and only show one per row in one gigantic column. The other is messy in typing and consists of HTML, and I wanted to avoid that version altogether.
I’ve mentioned in the past that these towers need to be able to maximize the space and be able to fit three UIBs per row (since there’s space enough on the right to fit it) but these tables don’t have that feature atm.
Can you communicate with @Rupert28
to see what we can do to look into the tower we’re referring to because I"m all out of ideas to give the Template code page name and URL, if one exists.
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I think we also need to look into fixing some of the individual UIBs too. But I think I need to relay the broken UIBs from my User page first to see what can be done and what’s causing the mess as well, maybe there’s something we’re both missing. I just need a little more time to relay it all. I’ll get back to you on Monday or Tuesday of next week, @Rupert28
.
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Ok. Created a page listing all the troublesome UIBs which don’t work in my Userspace. Please find that page - here
.
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The commonality between all the broken ones is the image, so that’s definitely the issue.
And I don’t think it’s the actual UIBs that cause this issue, it’s the user box template that drives all UIBs.
I have tried fixing this image issue on my sandbox with some success, and these changes could be easily implemented save for one thing I wanted to discuss on here.
After fixing the issues, I also tried to make the id section align to the middle if there’s no image, which was successful, but to implement this we’d have to adjust all UIbs and change the font size in the id d section, setting it to 0 if there’s an image, which would be a lot of work and I’m not sure it’s worth it as the text doesn’t look too bad aligned to the top middle anyway
Do we think it would be worth all the work for the id text? Or others could take a look and see if there’s an alternative way to do this I can’t think of
Have a look at the work on my sandbox www.wikihow.com/User:Ruppy28/sandbox
JayneG
7
Thanks Chris, I’m putting aside some time to look into this during the week
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JayneG
8
Thanks so much for all your work on this @Rupert28
. I love the vertical align properties, they make my eyes happy!Nice extra detective work on the no_rounders class too.
I’m open to having a project to help update the existing UIBs to make the id-s field 0, but I don’t currently have a way to pull all URLs of UIB templates. I do have the categories though ( 47 of them
), so perhaps we could divide them up that way?
Once we get it all sorted, it would also be good to add the changes into https://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-wikiHow-User-Information-Box-(UIB)
.
At this time, I think it’s best to keep the tower to 2 UIBS across, on my screen it doesn’t look like there’s quite enough room for 3, and I think it’s best to work on one thing at a time!
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As I attempted the fix of one of our troubling UIBs, I discovered another trouble that those wishing to fix should watch out for. When some people are placing images in the ID field, they are not placing the correct style image in the ID spot. When I tried to fix Template:User-UNO
, I ended up removing the image and changing it, then when I had the chance to look over the history page (to grab the diff), I noticed some images are coming up with the image name and positioning (this one was initially said as “center”, like what the image uploading tool would say to use). However, I then changed it upon re-adding to the UIB and although the UIB isn’t 100% better, it’s better than it used to be. User-UNO was the only UIB where the info text was at the wee-bottom of the info field and not center, so even though you might change the ID size to 0, be careful that the image of the ID isn’t set to alignment types after the file name and vertical-bar (|).
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Good spotting @EpcotMagic
, maybe we can include checking for that in the project too.
I’ve gone through @JayneG
’s list of the categories and added URLs to each category page to make it easier for everyone.
Maybe we should create an official forums post for this project?
The instructions would just be something like:
Write your name next to some categories in the Google Sheets you’d like to tackle.
Open the category page.
Go through each UIB in the category and edit it. Set the ‘id-s’ field to 0 ONLY if there is an image, if not leave it blank or set it to 14 (which is the default anyway so it doesn’t matter)
Also have a look to make sure the image is just [[Image:ImageNameHere|40px]], and not [[Image:ImageNameHere| center]], which may break the template.
After we do all this we would still need to make the changes to the UIB master template so this actually makes a difference. (Jayne or another admin will have to do this, it’s protected)
And we should also include a ‘Notes’ column on the Sheets so people can report any issues with UIBs that need to be looked at, or if certain UIBs are protected and will need to be edited by an admin.
Not sure if some of the UIB categories are still relevant either, for example some only have one UIB in them, but I guess that’s a whole other project.
No @Rupert28
, I dont believe this should be a public project. Some UIB categories only have a few UIBs, while others have many (which we can attend to later). I made a few column addition adjustments to the Google Sheet to add Username, Status, and Notes and was thinking if we only claim 5 UIB categories at a time we can get this project completed relatively soon. I will help out; dont worry.
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Yep that does make sense actually, wikiText could be a little confusing for people unfamiliar with it and we don’t want people accidentally changing the wrong fields and messing up the UIBs.
It actually isn’t that much work now that I’m thinking about it, we’ll see what @JayneG
thinks when she gets back from her weekend:)
While going through and standardizing the UIBs through the first 13 categories (yep, claimed five at a time at first), I ended up correcting more than just the 0 in the id size field. I found border sizes much larger than what was mentioned in the Create a UIB page, as well as the default description text filling within the fields having no values, and one had both the standard text and values.
And as I said in Some template reminders
, there are some old UIBs that have old formatting with div HTML templates, along with span HTML templates.
About the only trouble, is some are written on a UIB language so old, they are written in table-form, yet they display “right” to the eye…I feel these should be converted to their newest form, but I haven’t had a chance to tackle this fixes, but noted them on the Sheet.
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I did a second large batch, and it was much like the first - over the last two large batches, I’ve done over 50% of the work. These are easy to complete, if you know UIB template styles. I’ll pick this project back up in a few days. I have other things to do for a little while. tt4n.
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Good news. I completed most of the list. However, there’s still 5 more categories that need some help! They’re big and would best be split up into multiple users. Are you up for helping me out, @Rupert28
?
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Wow you’ve done an amazing job with this! Those 5 categories I did took me so long, I can’t keep up
I have some pretty big exams coming up at school in a week, so I may not be able to get to any more categories for a while, but I’ll definitely try.
Would it be ok if I looked at some of the ones you’ve claimed but not completed @EpcotMagic
?
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Down to the last two categories - but one is all project & team UIBs, which can be quite the hassle.
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I’ve started on the User Teamcategory, although I didn’t get very far unfortunately.
I only managed to get the As and Bs done (view the categories in list view here
to easily distinguish between them, it’s alphabetical).
I will try and do some more but it won’t be until this afternoon (around 6 hours from now)
I honestly can’t believe the amount of work @EpcotMagic
has put into this
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