Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage redesign/Preview/Archive 1

Please create new topics under the most appropriate section.

= Design =

Brena, Heather, and Quim want to complete a first homepage redesign proposal based on this mockup. We welcome feedback improving and challenging the current design, but we will not deviate at this point from the basic structure proposed. We are prototyping now on a wiki page, so forking and proposing alternatives should be a lot easier.

Top box
I'm very impressed, great work, I'm going to base my feedback on the mockup rather than the code as implemented since it seems a little further along. from top to bottom:

(...) Again, great work, really looking forward to seeing this out in the wild. Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * the box on the text feels a little weird, we might want to just add a subtle drop shadow to the text or modify the actual image, to darken the top. The photo banner could actually be 50% taller i think, it feels very thin now. The "Community Collaboration" text should probably be in Title Case and the leading between it and the sub-title feels off.
 * (Jared, I took the liberty to integrate the rest of your feedback in own sections for better discussion)--Qgil (talk) 00:37, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

About the height of the box, it ultimately depends on the final image, but all in all I think it is good not to take too much space, pushing the rest of content further below. I think the mediawiki.org homepage will benefit from a wide graphic bringing color and character, but our product, our audience, and our community are probably not going to be impressed with a really big "inspirational" image taking over. That is my opinion, at least.--Qgil (talk) 02:44, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * , {{banner|direction=right does look nicer, but the text gets cut with narrower windows. While the image resizes, the text seems to be stuck to some right margin. Maybe there is something in the related CSS rules that can be improved? PS: thank you for your edits!--Qgil (talk) 20:00, 26 February 2014 (UTC)


 * You're welcome. The offending CSS rule that cuts of the text is . If you remove the , the text will behave (while not restricting the text to half the banner at the same time). —  Edokter  ( talk ) — 20:27, 26 February 2014 (UTC)


 * {{done}} and it works. Thank you!--Qgil (talk) 20:34, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Not removing the top box
Replying to the comments questioning the big top box. See Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Design_Document for the kind of homepages we have been looking at when considering a large opening image. I think it is worth trying. If we reach a point where the big top box is the only remarkable problem of the homepage then let's talk about removing it.--Qgil (talk) 02:22, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

What can you see without scrolling
,, , I took screenshots of the Preview wiki page and the current mediawiki.org homepage to see what can be seen without scrolling in different configurations: my laptop, my monitor in portrait (which is my default), and my monitor in landscape (really wide). In my laptop I only see the first row of features. In wide monitor I get to see the gallery, with luck. The monitor in portrait looks great, but it is sadly the less common configuration out there. Thoughts?--Qgil (talk) 22:51, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Perhaps this statistics can help us to decide which default resolution we should keep. --monteirobrena (talk) 21:55, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

While showing the top box and features to new comers is a good idea, regular visitors won't need to see this all the time. Potential solutions: Thoughts?--Qgil (talk) 23:04, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * users can clip the top box and features to see the news and shortcuts right away (and the site or the browser will remember)
 * this is the homepage for anonymous users, logged in users get the top box and features clipped by default (is this feasible?)
 * this is a homepage mainly for newcomers --regular visitors go to some kind of Community Portal to get 100% technical info, 0% marketing


 * says: "You would have to go a bit into the js side of things to do that. I'm not sure that's a good idea though. In my experience (on a wiki that used flagged revs), if the newbies see one thing, and regular users see another, what ends up happening is no one notices when the newbie oriented page is broken as the newbies don't know how to report issues (or even recognize something is an issue), which is bad because its the newbies where it is most important to make a good first impression."
 * Ok, so no different content to different users. What about the option of clipping content? Is it technically possible to offer unclipped content to anonymous users, clipped to registered users? About the clipping itself, Template:Collapse top does clip content but we would need a nicer implementation. For instance, we could keep the title (now "Community Collaboration") and a "expand" type of arrow. Anonymous users would see the full homepage with a "minimize" type of arrow. Or something along these lines.--Qgil (talk) 18:15, 27 February 2014 (UTC)


 * In my other laptop I get to see the 6 features and hint of the gallery, which is not that bad.--Qgil (talk) 20:02, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * In my laptop 13" - 1440 x 900, I can exactly like you. Unfortunately, I can't say how feasible is make this but I really like the idea and the gallery could be the top of page to regular visitors.--monteirobrena (talk) 21:55, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

, to try fix the banner problem in the wide screenshot, please update the max-width value on MediaWiki:Gadget-site.css file:  to. --monteirobrena (talk) 13:56, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅, thank you!--Qgil (talk) 17:20, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Margins
All the content feels uncomfortably close to the left and right container edges, I think having a bit more whitespace on either side would help.--Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * ✅ byy Brena & wikitext/Vector defaults--Qgil (talk) 22:28, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

"Get MediaWiki" button
I like that there's a great big "Get MediaWiki" button. It kinda reminds me of the big green "copy" button on copiers; there's no way to miss it. However, I think the main page should continue to say what the current version of MediaWiki is, and provide some of the same quick links we have now to certain useful content. If I were doing the redesign, I would keep the top half or two-thirds of the main page (including the Using MediaWiki, System Administration, and Developing & Extending parts) mostly the way it is now. I would condense the Welcome to MediaWiki.org section by getting rid of the newlines, and replace the icons with either better icons or more quick links, since the current icons aren't all that descriptive of the concepts they represent and thus are mostly wasted space as it is now. I would keep the Current Version section the way it is, except move it up to the top right and put a big "Get MediaWiki" or "Download MediaWiki" button there.Leucosticte (talk) 00:35, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Icons
The icons using on preview is the initial proposal, feel free to suggest and do improvements. --monteirobrena (talk) 20:42, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I like both icon styles but i think we need to stick with one or the other, the top row speaks to me a bit more, so perahps we could use that style for all 6 icons. (black rounded outlines, brand colors used as accents)
 * gears don't really make me thing "Extend" this might be a place where we could use the puzzle piece iconography.
 * I think we need an icon for "reliable" from a quick search this is usually represented as a simplified bar graph or tachometer those seem boring, but I can't think of something better off the top of my head.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * In fact I wanted to propose to use the "W" in the first place, as a clear visual cue to the fact that MediaWiki is used by Wikipedia and there is a strong link between both. I would be even open to change the text to adapt better to the context of the "W", for instance stressing the fact that MediaWiki is open, free, and developed for very prominent projects. If nobody else thinks that keeping the "W" is worth then I won't fight for it, but if you also see the point...--Qgil (talk) 01:31, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Beyond the icons, after hearing the first comments I think we need slightly longer texts for these 6 features. Currently the icons and the very short texts leave too much space for people's interpretations. Brena, take into account that longer texts might show up next to these icons.--Qgil (talk) 01:56, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Gallery
I'd love to see these pictures bigger, maybe staggered left and right? they aren't really clear call to actions, are they access points to this type of information or asks that i create extend this type of information, its unclear at this point when i think of myself as a user new to this page,--Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * The texts/links/images can be improved, but let's focus on the width of the gallery. Currently we are using which, as far as I'm aware, doesn't allow to define e.g. "width: 95%". If this is indeed not possible then we will need to re-do the gallery manually.--Qgil (talk) 22:13, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Just put it inside a div - . Bawolff (talk) 23:56, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I should note that the perrow attribute only has an affect on the "traditional" gallery mode. Bawolff (talk) 00:50, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅. Thank you Bawolff. --monteirobrena (talk) 12:44, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * , I see no 95% width in my browsers. The div didn't change the previous behavior.--Qgil (talk) 02:19, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I see a difference of 26px on each side with the 95%. Bawolff (talk) 03:14, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Button Style
Buttons, as mentioned, lets use the mediawiki.ui style buttons, looks like S Page (WMF) has you covered there.--Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * What bulleted list are you referring to?--Qgil (talk) 00:40, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅. mediawiki.ui is used like style of buttons. --monteirobrena (talk) 14:42, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Opacity of buttons
, I agree with your idea of having the buttons opaque, but I don't know how to apply, if that's the right code at all. Help. :) --Qgil (talk) 19:09, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Its a bug in the gallery code. My bad. (Opacity very conter-intuitively cannot be unapplied). Bawolff (talk) 05:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * 116227. To be honest, since the buttons already have a background, it might look better to ditch the white transparent background altogether, something roughly like: Wikimedia Hackathon 2013 - Flickr - Sebastiaan ter Burg (30).jpg Development   (To kill the white background properly, [After the above gerrit change is merged] you would probably need to put custom css in the site stylesheet. Something along the lines of  ). Bawolff (talk) 06:29, 1 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Actually i like the white bar in the background before the Image. It's look like a hover, maybe the buttonstyle on it is irritating? --Gunnar.offel (talk) 07:32, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I like the white bar, too. But I believe that button without transparency will be better. However I don't know how to do this. Any help? --monteirobrena (talk) 12:50, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

News and media
The video in the bottom left doesn't have a clear call to action, what is this thing, why do I want to watch it? News seems to need a header of some sort.--Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I would replace the News and New Opportunities sections with something more useful; I'm not sure what, though. Maybe randomly featured content; e.g. there could be a randomly featured extension section, if people wanted to put in the effort to write up some blurbs for various stable or beta extensions. Or randomly featured documentation pages. Or new extensions. Or new documentation pages. (That would be the equivalent of a "Did you know").


 * Maybe there's just not a whole lot that needs to be said on the main page, which is why the current main page has so much whitespace and so much content that will be of use to only a small number of people (e.g. notices of gatherings in Zurich), and why the preview calls for having a big photo of a crowd of people, great big icons, and lots of whitespace. It's basically filler and/or decoration. We're not exactly going for the Craigslist look of cramming as much text on the main page as possible. It's also not as though we have a large enough readership or editorship that there would be much interest in creating the kind of "Today's featured article" or "Did you know?" or "News" content that makes Wikipedia's main page a go-to place for introducing oneself to intriguing new topics and goings-on. It would be badass if we could maintain something like that, but we probably can't. Leucosticte (talk) 00:35, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * The News and media row needs more thought, yes. First, as it is now the big logo doesn't fit there at all. Then, both News and Media would need proper headers and a more compact design. I still think that it is worth using two boxes for News and Media, but I'm less sure about the third.--Qgil (talk) 01:12, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Qgil no boxes! mw has too many boxed, use a grid and whitespace and clear titles, but no more boxes please.Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 00:19, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Logos of MediaWiki users
We seem to have lost the "other companies/projects that rely on mediawiki, I think its important to have.--Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * We decided to leave them out for now. It will require some extra community consensus, and it can be easily added if/when we agree on it.--Qgil (talk) 00:50, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

So many people!
I hope it's not an indication of anti-social tendencies on my part that I'm somewhat bothered by all the people and photos on the front page. :) First, it's unexpected - I don't think I've seen other software homepages that featured photos of the developers quite so prominently. (Please correct me if there are other such pages.) But I think there might be a deeper issue, which is that it changes the focus: instead of "how can this software help you", it's "look at us, making this software in our tight-knit community". It might be intended to show humanity or inclusivity, but it seems oddly... alienating. Yaron Koren (talk) 00:23, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * You have a point. When it comes to the top box, the image is the most appropriate we have got so far, and we are happy to update it with a better one. Then yes, the pictures in the gallery also feature people, and at the end this gives the impression of an overcrowded homepage, in the literal sense of the word. Then again, the images of the gallery can also be improved with new ones. his is one of the reasons of moving the prototyping to a wiki page.--Qgil (talk) 01:18, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, "overcrowded" is a good word. Why even have an image? I've just looked through a bunch of other software homepages, both open source and proprietary, and I don't see any that have that kind of large, informationless image, especially not one that dominates the starting screen (users have to scroll down to see pretty much anything else). Yaron Koren (talk) 01:30, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Agreed. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:51, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Ah, now I see - this was where the decision to have a big image at the top was made. But the difference between those images and the current MediaWiki redesign one is that those images, to quote the page, "tell a story" - they convey something about the software, whether it's through screenshots, or metaphors (a writing pad), or just some graphic that indicates that the software is fun, uncluttered, etc. The current MediaWiki image says nothing about the software - or at least, nothing good. Perhaps a screenshot would work well there, or perhaps there is some outside image that can serve as a metaphor for MediaWiki. I've actually thought quite a bit about this, back in 2012 when I was trying to come up with a cover for my MediaWiki book. I very strongly considered this as a visual metaphor, for instance. (We ended up going with stylized wikitext instead.) But unless there's a meaningful image there, I would say no image is the way to go. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:50, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Pretty much this. I'll add that if any huge image is used, it needs to be optimized for reasonable performance (no multi-megabyte images...) and any additional weight to the page from the image needs to be measured against the image's functionality. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:56, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Social media icons
Let's use the icons of third party services according to their licenses: Twitter, Google+, Facebook. Should we add more? MediaWiki in... StackOverflow? Quora? ...? --Qgil (talk) 21:58, 27 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Updated official logos of Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter. --monteirobrena (talk) 14:36, 28 February 2014 (UTC)


 * A lot better, thank you. They look blurry, don't they? This is surely because of the automatic resizing. Once their final size is clear, you could produce the PNGs locally with that size, upload them as updates of the current ones, and call the PNGs directly.--Qgil (talk) 17:43, 28 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Even better, use svgs. They'll never look blurry, even on retina displays. --Courier New (talk) 17:47, 28 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, svgs is always better but by default they don't share this format so we need generate the svgs by ourself. --monteirobrena (talk) 18:31, 28 February 2014 (UTC)


 * They have the vector files as .eps. I believe you can import those in Inkscape (and export them to svg), but if not, I'm sure we'll find someone with a copy of Illustrator to do this. --Courier New (talk) 18:37, 28 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Perhaps true of raw SVGs, but on Wikimedia wikis, most(?) SVGs are rasterized as PNGs before being served to clients (for now). --MZMcBride (talk) 16:57, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Location of the icons
, thank you very much for your help improving the preview! I agree the previous location of the social media icons nder the video wasn't good, but I'm not convinced either about the single row with an hr line. I wonder... how would they look next to the "News" header, aligned to the right? It is a frequent position for these type of icons.--Qgil (talk) 17:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * , I totally agree to what you said, the design right now is better that just placing the icons on the bottom, thanks for your suggestion! :D --Gabrielchihonglee (talk) 06:57, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

= Content =

You can edit the homepage preview texts directly, as long as you keep their current purpose. If you want to change the purpose of text elements, please discuss them here first.

Title
"Community collaboration" puts the emphasis on the fact that MediaWiki is developed for communities, implicitly telling that is developed BY communities as well. If you have a better concept or wording please propose it here.--Qgil (talk) 15:31, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I removed the MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview title, as it seems the banner serves the role of having a title. Bawolff (talk) 00:52, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Bawolff. I already removed title, line and breadcrumb with CSS using my personal file. --monteirobrena (talk) 14:08, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Tagline
About "All sizes covered", the idea is that MediaWiki can handle communities of any size. It is useful as a personal archive or a tool to write a book, it is useful for a small team creating a knowledge base, for mid-sized companies, and for huge projects like Wikipedia, Wikia or WikiHow. If you have a better concept or wording please propose it here.--Qgil (talk) 15:31, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's a reflection on the hard work done by the redesign team that there have been dozens of comments so far on the details of the HTML and CSS used on the page, but not one (until now) on the proposed tagline for the entire MediaWiki application. But it does suggest that this might not be the right venue to decide on a tagline. I would think a separate process should be used for that - either just another wiki page, or some kind of actual voting mechanism. This is an important decision, and I think it makes sense to separate it from the other details of this redesign.


 * That being said, I do have some thoughts on the current proposed tagline:


 * First of all, it's not clear that "Community Collaboration" and "All sizes covered" are really a title and tagline, respectively - they seem to me more like a tagline and a sub-tagline. Does the phrase "Community Collaboration" show up anywhere else on the page, or in the wiki?
 * As I've also said about the image, a tagline is not necessary - certainly there are a lot of open source and proprietary applications that don't have one.
 * Could there be some clarification about whether "Community Collaboration" and/or "All sized covered" (or whatever replaces one or both) is a true tagline in terms of something meant to show up on t-shirts and the like?
 * As to "Community Collaboration" and "All sized covered" themselves, I have mixed feelings about them. "Community Collaboration" I have no problem with - it's straightforward and innocuous. "All sized covered", on the other hand, I'm not sure about - on the one hand, MediaWiki's ability to handle installations of all sizes is one of its major selling points; on the other hand, the phrase itself seems awkward. (And, in conjunction with the current image, its meaning really seems unclear, but that's more a function of the poorness of the current image.) I wouldn't be surprised if a more... inspiring tagline could be found, assuming MediaWiki even needs one (or two). Yaron Koren (talk) 15:06, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * You are not the first one having mixed thoughts about the tagline, so I removed it. Let's continue working on the content here as well, please. Voting a slogan? I don't think it is a good idea. Let's discuss as much as needed and, above all, let's look at the better proposals received. So far I haven't seen a slogan or a banner picture challenging the current ones. I thik they are good enough for a first release. "Community collaboration" becoming an official slogan? Do we need this?--Qgil (talk) 17:00, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, my thought was that there are potentially people who would have an opinion on a tagline, who aren't even aware that it's currently an issue for discussion. But I think the one tagline/slogan now looks better already. Since you mention the banner picture, I think no image would be better than the current one, as I've stated elsewhere. But if there has to be an image (I don't know why), I would think a screenshot, like the one proposed in the initial redesign mockup makes more sense - it at least conveys something useful. Yaron Koren (talk) 18:04, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Main description
The main explanation of MediaWiki currently reads:

MediaWiki is a collaborative publishing platform that can scale and be extended to empower big and diverse communities like Wikipedia. No matter how specialized, large, and multilingual you want your creative community to be, MediaWiki has you covered.

There's clearly an attempt to do some touchy-feely branding here with words like "empower", which is admirable, but I think overall it's the wrong approach. That's for two reasons: first because it's too vague about what MediaWiki actually is, and second because the focus on community is not appropriate for many - or even most - usages. I think about half the installations of MediaWiki are for internal use only. Someone considering using MediaWiki to, say, store their company's internal operations manual might look at the text and think, "Our group of employees doesn't need to be empowered, it isn't big or diverse, it's not really a community, it's not specialized, large or multilingual, and it's not creative for that matter either. Is this really the right tool for us?"

I would argue for something more pedestrian and informative, ideally including some or all of these words and phrases: "wiki software", "content management", "open source", "very popular", "stable", "reliable", "large developer base", "many different usages", "enterprise", "extensions". Some of that echoes other text already on the page, but I think it's fine to reinforce important concepts. Yaron Koren (talk) 17:56, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

The right 6 features?
Considering that we have six placeholders? Would you change any of the current features for another one?--Qgil (talk) 01:43, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * After the feedback received, I'm thinking of removing "Discuss" and bring in "Free". Also change some titles, leaving things like this:

Powerful - Multilingual - Mobile Extensible -  Reliable   -  Free
 * Details about each feature in its section below.--Qgil (talk) 19:03, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Misleading features
Brian Wolf says: "When i read that page it makes it seem like these features are available out of the box, which is kind of misleading." Right, then we need to be more clear with the text. This is better than only trying to promote what comes in the tarball, ignoring what you can also get through extensions, right?--Qgil (talk) 01:50, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree the line between MediaWiki Core and extensions needs to be understood by readers, but I see no reason to limit the features to what Core can provide. mediawiki.org is the home of the extensions as well, and the fact is that nowadays most new features are developed as extensions.--Qgil (talk) 18:59, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Powerful
Brian Wolf says: "In particular claiming we have wysiwyg editing without mentioning visual editor is extremely difficult to install doesnt seem like a good idea." Yes, agreed. We will need more space for text in these items. This homepage won't go live before MediaWiki 1.23. I asked James Forrester whether VisualEditor was aiming to be installable in 3rd party wikis for that release and he said that this is something they are working on. We can fine tune the text as a real release date for this homepage comes. I think it is good to be ambitious, but we don't need to oversell, agreed.--Qgil (talk) 01:53, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Multilingual
I would think that it makes sense to rename this to something like "Global". This currently seems to imply that MediaWiki is great because you can use it to translate - which is of course true, but I'm guessing that what was meant was that it's already been translated into many languages, and thus can be used internationally. Yaron Koren (talk) 01:54, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Is the problem the title or the description (or both)? I have expanded the description. "Multilingual" might be more descritive than "Global", if the title needs to be changed.--Qgil (talk) 02:05, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I thought the description was fine before; the problem to me was only the title. Obviously, the ability to translate stuff is important, but that's a rather minor usage of MediaWiki, all in all; existing language support, on the other hand, is crucial. Yaron Koren (talk) 02:18, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The problem of handling multilingual sites is pretty common, and MediaWiki offers powerful tools to address it, probably better than many other alternatives. Maybe the fact that the Translation bindle is not more used or even a driver of MediaWiki adoption is that many sysadmins / publishers don't even know that it exists?--Qgil (talk) 02:32, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Maybe - I don't know what the overall thinking behind this feature list is, or how concise each description is supposed to be. I do think the title should change, though. Yaron Koren (talk) 03:24, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Reliable

 * "Tested and maintained as long as Wikipedia exists." And hopefully even longer; I'm sure a challenger to the throne will emerge at some point. Wikipedia might also migrate to some other engine eventually; the tech world is a fast-paced place full of creative destruction. Leucosticte (talk) 23:51, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Sure, but while that day comes, featuring the Wikipedia name and "W" is a good proof of reliability and a marketing asset that MediaWiki can benefit from. If a challenger beats Wikipedia, editing that block will be the easiest thing.--Qgil (talk) 00:24, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * its unlikely wikipedia would move (mediawiki is made by and for wikipedia, especially originally). Should phase IV ever come along, it would probably be named mediawiki 2.0. Bawolff (talk) 23:45, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Discuss
Dropped in order to make room to Free.

Current four "main boxes" could be restructured
The four "main boxes" in the middle of the page (that's what I'm calling them, for lack of a better word) are currently "Documentation", "Support", "Development" and "Get involved". I think the current set is not quite ideal. It's not clear, for instance, what the difference is between "Development" and "Get involved"; and in fact, "Development" links to the "Developer hub" page, which is already linked prominently in the "Get involved" page. I would just get rid of "Development". Conversely, there should probably be a new box there, maybe called "About", that links to some page with explanatory text and links. There are various questions that new visitors to the page might have, that it's hard to figure out how they would get at the moment. These include:
 * what is a wiki?
 * what is MediaWiki?
 * is it open source?
 * who uses it? (Covered in the section below.)
 * what is the version history?
 * what are some possible upcoming features?

Some of these questions are explained, or linked to, in the current homepage, but can't be found in the redesigned one.

Also, the "Support" box links to Project:Support desk, but it perhaps it should link to Communication, or some new page like "Communication", instead. Unless the implication is meant to be that the "Support desk" forum is a better place to ask questions than the mailing lists, IRC channels, etc. Perhaps it is - if so, I wasn't aware. Yaron Koren (talk)
 * My comments on the main description above now cover at least some of the "About" stuff. Yaron Koren (talk) 17:57, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Now "Development" points to How to contribute, and the free spot has been allocated to "Report a problem". Regardless of the final copy of the description, let's agree that it will start with a visible "MediaWiki" for those needing an introduction. I think it is good to provide a clear destination to people seeking MediaWiki support. Project:Support desk is not the only place, it is not perfect, and it is only in English, but at least the landing is clear, it is easy to post questions, and people do get answers. Sending these users to Communication probably means getting a lot of users confused, going to StackOverflow instead.--Qgil (talk) 22:41, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

I have made two changes to the "gallery" (let's call it like this) based on feedback (let's forget about the pictures until we confirm the concepts we go for): User Guide - Support - Report a problem - Development The current labels are more precise and descriptive, easy to differentiate from each other and from other items in the content area.--Qgil (talk) 22:34, 27 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, I agree that the Communication page isn't ideal as a start page either. It sounds, then, like what's needed for support is a good introductory page for users, that's cleanly laid out, in the manner of the "How to contribute" page. I put a mockup for such a thing together in about half an hour, that you can see here - it's based almost entirely on the "How to contribute" page, although with one new icon (also from the Noun Project). I don't know if this page itself is ideal, but something like this makes the most sense, I would think. Yaron Koren (talk) 17:21, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * That is an improvement, yes. What about proposing at Communication an evolution in that direction? We don't need to create new critical pages when many of the current ones are half-baked. I have too many fronts open now with this homepage redesign, but I will support your idea and help with the details.--Qgil (talk) 17:36, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, "support" isn't the same as " communication" - among other things, documentation and consulting fit into the former but not the latter. So I'd say creating a new page is the way to go, as painful as that might sound. Yaron Koren (talk) 19:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ,, what do you think about User:Yaron Koren/Support page as a new destination page for "Support", as opposed to Project:Support desk or Communication? I don't have a strong opinion, just some default reluctance to create new pages before exhausting the possibilities to reuse and improve an existing one.--Qgil (talk) 22:50, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I like User:Yaron Koren/Support page. Let's use that instead of directly linking to the support desk. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:54, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Something about existing usage?
Given that this has a marketing feel (which is good), I think there should be something about the current usage of MediaWiki here. MediaWiki is the world's most popular wiki software - I don't think many people would disagree with that. Besides Wikimedia sites, it's used on the world's most popular wiki farm (Wikia), and it's used by governments, corporations and organizations around the world. Could there be some text to reflect that? Testimonials would be nice too, of course, although that requires some separate effort. Yaron Koren (talk) 00:34, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * In previous versions we had a list of MediaWiki users that even included a SemanticMediaWiki logo. :) However, we decided to leave them out for now. It is a separate community discussion that has a risk of becoming dense. We can bring them back if there is a clear plan, though.--Qgil (talk) 01:23, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Right - a logo wall, like a set of testimonials, would require additional work and discussion. Much as I'd like to see the Semantic MediaWiki logo there, I'm really just talking about having text that indicates that yes, this is very popular software - even "the world's most popular wiki software", if the lawyers will agree to it. :) Yaron Koren (talk) 01:34, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Should this concept become one of the six features? In exchange of which one? Changing "Reliable" for "Most popular", keeping the "W"? Otherwise "Discuss" might be the weakest link, resulting in: Publish - Translate - Extend || On the go - Reliable - Most popular.--Qgil (talk) 02:11, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I figured it could just be added to the text on the front page, but I don't know. Does everything need to be fit within that "features" framework? It would be great for the front page to state that MediaWiki is open source, too, for instance, but I don't know if that requires an icon. Yaron Koren (talk) 03:11, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * ✅, see .--Qgil (talk) 19:51, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Images, licenses
What http://en.wikivoyage.org seems to do is to make the panoramic images in the homepage link to an article where the same image is prominently featured at the top. There you can click it for credits. A good compromise? The current work with the buttons done by helps users clicking the right pixels, but there is still a risk of confusing users by offering clickable images in the homepage that lead to a File: page. Of course another solution is to add credits to the homepage. Do thhey need to be right next to the images? Would a small legend at the bottom suffice? A link to "Image credits"? Seeking relicensing from the authors of the pictures and use only those that can be published without these considerations? Trying to think the different possibilities. We must solve this.--Qgil (talk) 15:42, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

= Code =

Clickable images in gallery
I thought we could just use the beautiful design offered by the MediaWiki gallery in our row with four pictures. However, the problem of this is that the pictures themselves are cickable, which makes sense total sense for a gallery but not for a homepage. "link=" won't work here. Can this behavior be implemented in the current gallery in any way? Should we just replicate the HTML manually?--Qgil (talk) 19:32, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Unless you find a way to give attribution, you pretty much have to have them clickable. I think this is an acceptable difference between us and other homepage types... what do you think? heather walls (talk) 21:02, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Not a bad argument. Let's keep it as it is.--Qgil (talk) 21:03, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

mediawiki.ui
I'm trying apply mediawiki.ui in span tag but the style isn't applied. Is there any configuration I have to do first? I'm trying like this. --monteirobrena (talk) 14:53, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * might be able to help.--Qgil (talk) 16:48, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The module that has the CSS,, isn't loaded by default (to confirm, in a browser console enter mw.loader.getState("mediawiki.ui.button") , it's "registered" but not actually "ready").   proposes to load it on all pages for exactly this reason. Vote early and often! :)  In the meantime, you could put code to load it in MediaWiki:common.js , see how en:MediaWiki:Common.js does it. -- S Page (WMF) (talk) 21:52, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * , thank you so much. I created the file common.js and mediawiki.ui was apply. --monteirobrena (talk) 22:31, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I have edited MediaWiki:Common.js. Thank you S!--Qgil (talk) 23:37, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * ✅. Thank you S Page (WMF) and Qgil. --monteirobrena (talk) 11:48, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

News
The news added on preview was collected from tech blog more specifically from posts using MediaWiki category. We need find a way to feed this automatically. Any idea? --monteirobrena (talk) 21:17, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * We don't know yet what source we will use, and how we will update the news manually. In the meantime updates will be done manually.--Qgil (talk) 00:27, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/mediawiki/feed/ should work, but it'll require a configuration tweak first (cf. 61888). --MZMcBride (talk) 02:24, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/ provides decent results already now, could be used as a working solution. I haven't used Extension:RSS before, it looks like the styling of the items is done through separate wikitext templates. Neat.--Qgil (talk) 19:22, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅. Thank you MZMcBride and Qgil. --monteirobrena (talk) 16:46, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I would please that the topic-links in the News not be bold. Maybe the media-box could be also resized, so that the news"headlines" are on 1 line per Link. --Gunnar.offel (talk) 07:37, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Video
The video used was found in a search with words: video + feature. The idea is feed automatically such as links. Any help? --monteirobrena (talk) 21:36, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * That video will need to be updated manually until we find a better way to solve this. Also, we might want to leave it as "Media" more than commiting to video. We might have a PDF, an image...--Qgil (talk) 00:26, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * if you have a list of videos its not that hard to make a different one show up (after each cache clear) using #expr to do a mod of either current timestamp or current number of edits, and then #switch to chose which video to show. Bawolff (talk) 23:39, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I added 2 more that now rotate randomly (You can add more at MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview/randomVideo). I would suggest maybe a more link that links to somewhere in commons (perhaps commons:Category:MediaWiki videos, although that category isn't well populated). Bawolff (talk) 00:48, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

General thoughts
I largely agree with others who have already commented, but my thoughts specifically:


 * Header image is overly large and unnecessary
 * Wikimedia Foundation logo is overly large and unnecessary
 * Most of the proposed text is really bad and needs to be rewritten

File:MediaWiki Homepage Mockup Graphic With Help Links.png is a good first draft, but it still needs substantial improvement.

Is the sidebar part of this discussion? --MZMcBride (talk) 02:04, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * We have left the sidebar aside :) for now, although we have discussed about it. I think it could also get some love in terms of content and styling. See Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Design_Document (thoughts) and MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Design_Document/Texts (a very initial draft welcoming improvement).--Qgil (talk) 02:38, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * "really bad" wasn't helpful, but I was having difficulty articulating a better point at the time. Let's try again.
 * For the text in the mocks and initial designs, I'd strongly suggest using lorem ipsum or equivalent filler text. I think it's distracting to have content in there. And I think anyone strictly focused on the design and usability of the page will have a lot of difficulty writing decent, appropriate text for this page. As Brian and others have noted, there needs to be careful wording to avoid misunderstandings about what MediaWiki is capable of and to appropriately highlight what's important.
 * If the sidebar isn't part of the design, I'd suggest leaving it unchanged from its default behavior in mocks to avoid confusion. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 05:17, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * All noted. We moved away from the mockup, and now MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview is what we have as reference (with the real sidebar again). The content is there to be improved, and your help is welcome --see .--Qgil (talk) 18:47, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Table or div
Question to the experienced audience: where should we use wikitext tables, HTML tables or s ? Until now we have focused on creating a wiki page that looks like we want, prioritizing wikitext tables. I think mobile and modern HTML in general prefers divs over tables, but what do I know.--Qgil (talk) 22:18, 26 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Regarding tables, there should be no difference between wiki or HTML. The enwiki main page uses wiki tables, but uses HTML tables where some parser functions are involved because wikmarkup and parser functions sometimes bite. As for tables vs. divs, divs were the promised land to replace tables for layout, but disvs never offered the level of control you have with tables, so there is no clear preference (and with the  attribute, it doesn't really matter).
 * I have a version of the enwiki main page done in divs (see [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Edokter/Main_Page?withCSS=MediaWiki:User:Edokter/Main_Page.css here]), and I can tell you it takes a little more work, but offers a higher degree in flexibility, especially for automatically rearranging (stacking) the divs on narrower screens. Go ahead and try it out. — Edokter  ( talk ) — 23:03, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Divs do indeed offer no control over the layout, because that's what CSS is for. In 2014, we really should try and use modern standards to do this, table-based will come to bite us pretty quickly. I've started to code up the current design using clean HTML over here. User:Courier New/demo