Dogcraft Wiki:Survival 5 launch maintenance

Survival 5 launch maintenance was an initiative on the dogcraft wiki starting around 2022 March 17. It included multiple projects, with the aim of improving the wiki for Survival 5 and easing future maintenance. Improving site performance and reducing page load times was also a goal.

Initiatives

Infobox 2.0

Infobox 2.0 design mockup created by User:William.

After four worlds, the infoboxes template code became messy and complicated to update, while the base {{Infobox}} template all infoboxes were based on had become outdated. Initially plans were made to create completely new, but identical looking infoboxes for Survival 5 with the Lua-based {{Infobox2}} template as a base while keeping the previous boxes on existing pages. Following discussion, instead of completely new infoboxes, the previous ones were re-written to use {{Infobox2}} as a base, and also received a visual update and support for multiple images.

The related {{WorldSwitch}} template -responsible for automatically creating links and categories based on which world a page is on- was also updated to use Lua, at {{WorldSwitch/World}} and {{WorldSwitch/Subworld}}. A new template, {{WorldPills}} was written to create the world labels found at the top of infoboxes.

Page history for the new infoboxes' creation can be seen at Special:History/Dogcraft_Wiki:Sandbox/Infobox_2.0 and Special:History/Module:Infobox, while relevant discussion can be seen on Discord, starting here:

Discord message from William:

Hello folks! Infoboxes are overdue a refresh and we're planning on updating them. Here's a mockup of how Infoboxes might look with a new design. We'd like your thoughts on it.

• New design and layout, with rounded corners to reflect the site styling. We've been rocking the same infoboxes since the Wiki moved to DC.net.
• The article subject's world is front and center in the top part of the infobox.
  • Disambiguating between what's on what world has never been more important with so many worlds and articles.
  • The world "pill" at the top is black in this mockup. Worlds will each be color coded!
  • On Survival 4 and 5, a second adjacent pill with the sub-world would be present.
  • Clicking the pill takes you to the world page.
• Infoboxes will support not having photo captions properly - currently an awkward space is left!
• Infoboxes will support having (sliding) galleries of multiple images.
• Infoboxes should only have one section ideally from here on out - Transport sections, for example, should be consolidated into one row with nice icons.
• Each infobox type will have a re-order, to prioritise important information higher up.
• Slight formatting change on "location". Survival 4 clickable "location" links to dynmap will be removed.
• The "status" field will be retired - It's not very useful, rarely-updated and doesn't work well on mobile.

Status

Primary Infoboxes - The ones that are used on actual articles, prioritized with the update/rework:

• Build ☑️
• Base
• Event ☑️
• Group ☑️
• Project ☑️
• Settlement ☑️
• Station*
• Shelter* ☑️

Specialized Infoboxes - These have one specific niche of a few pages where they are present, but aren't in general use. Mostly found on server information, site content, info, etc. pages:

• Service
• World
• YouTuber**

Player Infobox - See #User_page_updates

Navbox 2.0

TBD

User page updates

Updates to user pages were also proposed. The first of these, a visual update to {{Pagetabs}} has already happened (diff).

Proposals for {{Infobox Player}} were postponed and moved into this 'initiative' from Infobox 2.0. (Template:Infobox Player, while using the Infobox template as a base and looking like all other infoboxes, has a different enough use-case -user information on personal pages- to be treated differently. It is the most complicated infobox by far. This does not necessary mean the player infobox would stop using the base Infobox template, however the possibility exists.)

Nomenclature

WIP

Navigation

An update to make wiki navigation more intuitive and finding pages easier was suggested by User:Asteria042 on Discord here. This is an ongoing process, if you want to join the discussion, you may do so on the Wiki Discord!

Current progress can be checked at Project:Sandbox/Main Page.

Performance

One of the main goals of the entire maintenance was improving site performance and speeding up page load times. Some heavier templates, such as the base Infobox, were transferred to equivalents using Scribunto/Lua. (Lua improves perfromance: wp:User:Dragons_flight/Lua_performance, mw:Lua_scripting/Benchmarking and wp:Wikipedia:Lua_speed)

mw:Extension:TemplateStyles was installed to make MediaWiki:Common.css, which is loaded at all page loads, shorter. (WIP)

• Site admin changes
• Misc:
  • Featured Articles
  • /Rules updates
  • This page was last modified on <date> (<time ago>)
  • VE 2 column layout button (paused)
  • Style changes
    • Heading sizes
    • Page Histories
• Gadget updates
• Template updates
  • Interface templates
  • Fa
  • Meta notice
  • From page, tt, TemplateStyles, Divider
  • Box, Lbox, Card, Flip card