Topic on Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018

Too late for a redirect; "empty space" in full-width third box mitigated by reducing min-width for boxes

And spent several seconds before figuring out that people here were commenting on MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018/Proposal. :)

Also, template at top: "More information and discussion about changes to this draft may be on the discussion page. Do not use the Discussion page". :D

@Elitre (WMF): One problem of MediaWiki is that every page has a discussion page, to encourage decentralized and duplicated discussion in several disconnected places... Maybe I should have dumped the proposal directly into the planning page. If that's less confusing. Hmm. :)

No, I think you could just create the page to redirect here and let go of the confusing disclaimer :)

@Elitre (WMF): Uh, I did not know that I could overwrite a StructuredDiscussions talk page to make it a redirect. Thanks a lot for the tip, too late now as both talk pages have been used already. My fault... Noted for next time! :)

At https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F28426543 , I've put a screenshot of my Safari browser with the bookmark panel open on the left. The central box doesn't look too nice, I just wanted you to see that :)

@Elitre (WMF): Thanks for the feedback and taking a look! We have five boxes. Do you have a better layout idea how to render five boxes, which works for all screen widths and looks nicer? The current behavior is intentional and I'm open to better behaviors.

Hi, I just saw that you tested "on smaller screen widths", but wasn't sure if that meant "on a regular screen that just happens to have a sidebar open at all time", which I imagine to be a quite regular thing. I think that Olga's team has the gurus for such questions? :) Thanks for all the work so far!

@Elitre (WMF): It's still not clear to me what "does not look too nice" and which potential problem to solve. Is it that the third box has the width of two boxes (that's because 5 boxes cannot be divided by 2 to always have 2 boxes per line on such a screen width)? That boxes are used in general (that was also the case with the previous design in production, with way worse readability on smaller screens in the desktop version as boxes do not wrap into separate lines in the previous design in production)? Or something else?

I reached out to the public Design mailing list in as recommended on Design#How to get involved and work with us . I do not plan to try to track down individuals in some company "black box", as someone doing design work should not be required to do so.

Ciao, in my screenshot the Set up box ends up having a lot of empty space at the right. If its content were split up so that 3 links stay in a column on the left side of the box, and 3 at the right, it would prolly be more aesthetically pleasant for me (when I happen to have a sidebar open). Again, it doesn't prevent me from using the page ;) I just prefer how compact it all looks when the page is displayed in the way it's meant to be, with all the 3 boxes side by side. Thanks again!

@Elitre (WMF): Ah, thanks for the explanation! I agree. In the mean time I reduced the minimum width of the boxes, as requested by Kaartic, so the situation that you encounter should not happen anymore: Testing with Vector skin and 100% zoom level in Firefox 66 on a Linux machine, a content width of 1101px (until 812px) will move the third box to a separate row and now the width/length of the bullet points in the third box is 'long enough' that a second column of bullet points within the third box would not make sense anymore, so I guess the problem is kind of unintentionally resolved? :D

I think it is.