Forum:Home Page Redesign (An Adventurer Mar 2009)

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I think that ACC Wiki Home could use a redesign. I think it would be nice to have it laid out more like other wikis, like the wikipedia main page. What I am referring to are the sections wikipedia has labeled "Today's featured article", "Did you know...", "In the news" and such. Having our AC news and Wiki news tucked away as links on the side bar makes them less noticeable, and I admit I don't even update them much, but I probably would if they displayed on the front page. One other thought I had. With the wiki software we have, are drop down menus possible? Like the ones on WoWWiki or the LotRO Lorebook? --An Adventurer 14:50, 16 March 2009 (CDT)

I'm worried they would compete with navigational aspects. Ideally you can reach any content in the wiki in 3-4 clicks from the main page and the size of our wiki makes it possible (unlike Wikipedia where there's so much content that it's assumed people will just use the search box to get where they want to go) so more of the main page can be devoted to interest grabbing material. It's possible to do drop down menus yes, they can be integrated into skins I know, and I assume something could also be done with the default monobook, I'll try to get something working. --Tlosk 17:28, 16 March 2009 (CDT)

I have a drop down navigation menu working now, it works on IE7+ and FF. If you want to tweak the menu items or add new sections, edit the MediaWiki:Sitenotice and the linked templates. For new sections a new template must be created (just a bulleted list, see the templates used list at the bottom when editing Sitenotice for examples). --Tlosk 13:01, 17 March 2009 (CDT)

Nice work. One thing I have noticed - the page title does not display correctly with the drop down menu on some pages. It is only pages with short names or a short word at the the beginning of its name, like Forum and ACC Wiki Home. The short word is being placed right of the menu, and then continues where the title is supposed to be. This is only happening on higher resolutions/wider windows. It does not occur on my laptop (1440x900), but does on my desktop (1680x1050). Both are using Firefox, laptop is running Mac OS X, desktop is running Windows XP. --An Adventurer 13:11, 17 March 2009 (CDT)

Correction. It is occuring on my laptop as well. Could this possibly be fixed by placing the menus on the left side, right above the page title? --An Adventurer 18:40, 17 March 2009 (CDT)

Just double checking that this works now for you? Having them on the left makes the menus pop up in an annoying way anytime you go to use the edit etc tabs but having it all the way to the right makes the drop down menu bleed off the page for the right most menu item so I originally used a width fix to have them go not all the way over but we had the title wrap error you noticed. I found that using the margin instead of width fixed it. But the behavior depends on css and that is cached so it may continue until the cache is cleared normally or forced (hold shift while clicking the refresh button in the browser). Also I found a way to add menus to the sidebar so after the upgrade I can set up some examples and see what you think. --Tlosk 07:57, 20 March 2009 (CDT)