Forum:Main Page Slider

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I think a main page slider for this wiki's main page could be a good idea. What do you think, do you like the idea or not? Here is the slider below:

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  Episode 7

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  Eye Patch Lady

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  River Song

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  Series 6

I love the idea, maybe instead of linking it to the series it could be changed every week to show the latest episode. On another note, a slider could be used for spin off media in general, with a slide for the latest novel, audio play etc. --Revan\Talk 10:50, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

Of course. It can be changed every week, as that is such a brilliant idea. It will be constantly updated. When you say a slider could be used for spin off media in general, that could take up a lot of space, because main page sliders are quite big, so I don't know if that is possible. But good idea though! Cortion 10:58, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

I'm not a big fan. It serves little purpose other than being eye-catching. If you go to Template:Doctor Who Wiki/Slider, you can see this was attempted before. Read User:CzechOut's development notes on that page.----Skittles the hog--Talk 11:09, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

Well I think it's a brilliant idea. That attempt shown before, (not to be rude) was quite rubbish. This slider is gleaming with style. Cortion 11:23, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

What a ridiculous statement. It's the same thing with different pictures, and of course you think its brilliant, it's you idea. It's just not practical. The main page is fantastic as it is. It's go info a-plenty and interesting features. This little scroll box is just another piece of tack that looks fancy, but does next to nothing.----Skittles the hog--Talk 11:27, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

I think it's a really good idea, it's a much smarter, up-to-date and much better looking eay for presenting the information. However, the major downfall is that we have a large variety of information on the home page, which should, or needs to be displayed. We have, television, audio, comic and prose novels and we have no idea what to present in the slider. It is a ridiculous idea to present random articles this way of the main page and we can't present the "lastest" of each different kind of story, i.e last comic, audio etc in one slider, as we have many different types of these stories. Mini-mitch\talk 11:35, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

Information? It has four links with a sentence for each. Yes, it looks good, but it isn't an improvement for what is essentially an encyclopaedia. ----Skittles the hog--Talk 11:37, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

I don't take offense that Cortion thinks the previous attempt looked rubbish. It wasn't meant to look great. It was a test of the technology only. This looks better because you've used pictures that run against our image policy. You're using publicity photos here, which are always going to look better than screenshots.

But the problem isn't how good the pics look. The problem is that we're limited to four images. We can't fairly represent the content of this wiki with only four images. And were this on the front page, we'd be committing ourselves to having to change it weekly.

Another problem is that everybody and their mother is using this slider thing on their front page on Wikia wikis. Our front page is unique. I'm not saying the front page can't be improved. It's been the way it is for a year; it probably is time for some kind of change. But we need things that a) don't require more than about monthly maintenance and b) can show off the diversity of the DWU, not just the latest episode.

Oh, and to answer Revan and Mini-mitch's point upthread, sliders can't be used to represent other media. They require widescreen images, and there's no such thing as a widescreen image of books, magazines, comics or CDs. (Well, I suppose it could take the image from an interior comic strip, but that would usually be less helpful, and more work, than a cover.)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 11:50:26 Fri 03 Jun 2011 

Yeah, I like the uniqueness of the main page as well and four images really isn't enough to show the range of our content.----Skittles the hog--Talk 11:57, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

So how many images do you want then, Skittles the hog? And another thing, my statements are not ridiculous. Cortion 14:09, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

Just to throw some more hard facts about this slider business out into the discussion:

• The pics have to be precisely 673 x 410. To my mind, it is unrealistic to believe we're going to get editors, on a weekly basis, to change the slider. It's even more unrealistic to believe they'll upload four new pictures every week at precisely those dimensions. People get busy and forget about the main page. It's just a fact. They're not going to go through the process of cropping four different pictures to the very odd dimensions of 673 x 410 every Saturday night.
• Speaking of Saturday night, that's a barrier in itself. If it's not being changed on Saturday night, during the on-season, what's the point of it? And who's really doing a lot of editing on Saturday night? No, we're watching Doctor Who on Saturday nights. And then we're going out. Any feature which has to be changed on the night of a new episode, on the weekend, is doomed to failure.
• If people get into a squabble about the appropriateness of a particular picture, the thing will get screwed up. Let's say I didn't think the picture of River Song was the best one available. So I uploaded a new version of the pic. The effect would be that the main picture would change to the new image pretty quickly, but the thumbnail would remain set on the old version for up to several days. That'll just look weird. And if you think people around here won't try to update the pics with a version they like better, you've not spent much time with us.  :)
• The maximum description length for each frame is a mere 36 characters — and only 16 if we choose to align the thumbnails to the right. The maximum title length is 22 characters for bottom-alignment, and 10 characters for right-alignment. This speaks to Skittles' point: this feature is all form over substance. Here's just one example of why that's bad: we couldn't fit in the title A Good Man Goes to War as the title of the slider, in any alignment — nor, in right-alignment, as the description of a picture. This isn't Smallville, where episode titles are always one-word long. Titles in the DWU frequently are at (The Almost People), over The Unicorn and the Wasp, or way over (The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop) 16 characters.

As you can see, there are a lot of technical limitations to the feature. As Cortion has shown us, it looks great once you've got it all set up. But that can actually take some time, and there are some things that we can never display with it, no matter how hard we fiddle with it.

Of course, we are currently using a variation of the technology on the front page under our featured pics banner. The beauty of that variant, the so-called "gallery slideshows", is that they can be resized at will, there's no precise limit on the number of characters in the description, words can be wikified in the description, and we can have as many pics as we like. We could make that bigger, perhaps, and change some of the elements around on the page. (And it might be possible to turn off those rather silly-looking forward and back arrows to give the box cleaner lines; I dunno; I'd have to dig into the code some.)

Like I said, I'm not opposed to giving the main page a bit of a redesign. I just find this gallery thing terribly restricting for our needs.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:17:51 Fri 03 Jun 2011 

Thanks for laying out these points. Makes exactly what is wrong a lot clearer. I also like Cortion's comment "my stat[e]ments are not ridiculous"----Skittles the hog--Talk 17:16, June 3, 2011 (UTC)

It was a mistype, that's all. Cortion 08:31, June 4, 2011 (UTC)

The error wasn't my point, but it doesn't matter any more.----Skittles the hog--Talk 08:51, June 4, 2011 (UTC)