Forum:Portable infoboxes and you!

So here's a thing.

Your traffic here at the Fairytail Wiki will likely be evenly split between mobile and desktop users by next year. As you can see in the chart below, derived from Quantcast.com, about 45% of your American visitors are already on mobile devices, and about a third of you global audience is on a mobile device. There’s no logical reason to expect those mobile numbers to do anything but expand over the remainder of the decade. That's why I'm really excited to tell you about a new form of infobox that our engineering team have been developing. We call it the "portable infobox". And it does a lot of great things:
 * it looks great on phones - better than any other solution we've come up with to date
 * it's pretty easy to understand how to build
 * it's pretty easy to move your existing code to the new markup — without disturbing the data an images you have in place
 * it operates in the same way for the editor who's actually filling out the infobox as whatever infoboxes you're currently using
 * it will allow you, in the coming months, to actually use the data you put into infoboxes. As we continue to evolve the infobox into 2016, you'll be able to, for instance, add an automatically-updating list to a page of "all the characters voiced by Toshiyuki Morikawa", based upon the fact that you've added   to your various character infoboxes.

It would be ideal if we could try to get these new portable infoboxes up on your site by the end of July.

Making the switch
Obviously, you guys are code masters. So I want to give you an opportunity to try to migrate the infoboxes on your own. I know I wouldn’t like it if someone suddenly came onto my main wiki, Tardis, and just stared making changes to my infoboxes!

That’s why Wikia has tried to make it easy for you to help yourselves. When you go to an existing template, you’ll now see a little module pop up in the top right hand corner. It’ll ask you to convert the infobox to the new portable infobox code. If you accept that invitation, it’ll take stab at automatically converting the code for you. The tool isn’t perfect, though, and it will probably be confused by some of your more complex code. But it gives you a good starting point.

Special:Insights
We also have a second tool, called Special:Insights. This tool gives reports for more than just the new portable infoboxes, so you may have already seen it before. If not, here’s the help file. Mainly, though, it just runs various Special pages reports in a more user-friendly way. But the Portable Infobox report is new.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so well on your wiki, yet. This is because your infobox templates aren’t in the template namespace, but the project namespace. This is a highly unusual location for infobox templates, and the tool simply couldn’t have anticipated that. But i still wanted to mention Special:Insights to you, because some of our help files will refer to it.

If we moved all your templates to the proper template namespace, of course, Special:Insights would be of great help to you in this project. So I just wanted to ask if there was a particular reason for your infoboxes being in namespace:4, and whether you’d consider moving them to the template namespace?

Asking for help
Like me, you have some complex code in your infoboxes, so you may puzzle over how to translate a few things, here and there. That’s why it's really important that we get crackin' on these during the month of July. The main reason for the urgency is that we now have the ears of the engineering team. They're keenly interested in polishing the product. And so if we find anything that's unusual about your wiki's infoboxes, we'll be able to get very quick support, directly from the engineering team. None of the usual "File a Special:Contact and we'll get back to you with 48 hours" stuff. The workflow is going to be: you tell me, I get on the Bat-Phone to our engineers and we get you an answer within a few minutes, provided the question is asked when our guys and gals are in the office, obviously.

So please, as you go through this process, feel free to ask for any help you need. And, just to make sure these helpful pages are plainly evident to you, make sure you stop by:
 * Help:PortableInfoboxes
 * Help:InfoboxMigration

I want to stress that this is a rare opportunity to help shape the future of Wikia, and we're so happy to be able to offer it to this community. — CzechOut 07:44, July 23, 2015 (UTC)