Template talk:ExtensionTypes

I like this template a lot - really nice design. Well done! :-) --HappyDog 20:03, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Maybe Manual:Extensions and (perhaps also Extensions FAQ) should be added -- Duesentrieb ⇌ 22:17, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

forced white background color
The background color should not be forced bright white but should instead be linked to an overridable stylesheet class. I hate forced white background colors! —Eep² 10:26, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
 * If you're seeing bright white then you should sort out your monitor! It's 'ghost white' (actually, it's just off that named colour for some reason) and should look a faint blue colour.  A non-white background is required to make it stand out on the white pages that it is predominantly used on (note that the effect is very different when previewing it here in the template namespace).  Also, it is the style that has been adopted on this site for most of our templates, and I see no problem with what we have now.  Regardless of my opinion, however, this template should not be changed unilaterally and there should not be wider changes without a strong agreement from the community that such a change is necessary. --HappyDog 11:18, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Happydog, basic web design is to not force colors onto the end-user. The problem is, without a class, the table is only overridable if all span tags are overidden. This is not good web design in the least. White is white--and it doesn't matter what you want to call it, it's still bright and annoying (and painful even) in a darkened room. Put a class on it or I will. —Eep² 14:01, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * The point about making it overrideable is a good one. I would recommend creating a standard class for this type of template with some basic rules for the background color and maybe the border in Common.css.  That would have the added benefit of simplifying our navigation templates.  --Cneubauer 14:38, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Eep - this is not your wiki. Stop making threats and being so agressive in your edits.  I concede your point about making it a class - that is something we will need to look into.  However, the class definition will continue to style the box as it is currently styled.  If you want to override that in your user.css, then that is of course your prerogative, but we won't be changing the standard look of this template any time soon. --HappyDog 18:45, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Change to list of types
Nice template, but I wonder if "Magic Words" ought to be replaced by "Variables" - magic words is a technique that is used to support both variables and parser functions, it isn't something you would implement for its own sake. Everything else on the list is.

The confusion might come from the use of the term to identify any number of kinds of wiki markup that didn't fit into the definition into links and templates - see w:Help:Magic words. (it included, the &lt;nowiki> tag, and a number of others that are definitely not customizable). I suspect that reflects an early stage of Wikipedia development when the idea of a magic word (and even the phrase) may have been inspired by PHP terminology (PHP calls __FILE__ a magic word and this may be the basis for the small number of "magic words" that have a similar format, e.g. - probably have to ask someone who was "there") Egfrank 03:11, 5 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I only included Manual:Magic words originally because there was no page like Manual:Variable. I agree about variables being more appropriate.  --Cneubauer 13:20, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Table vs Spans
I actually like Template:InstallationNav much better then Template:Hubs. Why don't we standardize all templates on that model, getting rid of the table in favor of divs and spans with the | in between items. --Cneubauer 19:47, 20 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, it's the other way round - Template:InstallationNav was originally based on this template (see this revision) but this template has since been changed to be more like Template:Hubs. I agree that the old version was better, but it appears that the change was made because of some browser compatibility issues.  It would be good if we could have more details about the problem, so we could use the original version, but fix it to work in all browsers, instead of 'fixing' it by using a less good template. --HappyDog 16:51, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I am happy with standardizing Template:Hubs and Template:ExtensionTypes on Template:InstallationNav. I suggest another template is made to contain all the span and div tags, so that formatting is simply specifying an image and a list of pipe separated links to make it easier for people to edit by separating the presentation aspect and content. The Template:InstallationNav can then be made up of a table transcluding the three parts --Zven 21:37, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

This site http://browsershots.org/ might be useful to test any browser compatibility issues --Zven 21:40, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ive added a test template and some example tests in . Quite alot more functionality could go into it if others think this is a way to organize these templates. The current drawbacks are you must have only one image, and you have to specify the pipes as  between links --Zven 20:15, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Pretty good! Another drawback is that you have less control over the image positioning.  Compare the second two images on the installation nav example in the sandbox, and you will see that in the new template they are centered vertically, but in the original they are raised slightly so that they sit better in the box.  Any chance of incorporating that as an optional argument somehow?  "voffset"? --HappyDog 01:30, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply. Yes I noticed that at the time, Ive just had a look now and the main reason is that two of the images [[Image:Help-browser.svg|15px]], and [[Image:Preferences-system.svg|15px]] are square (48 x 48 pixels), and [[Image:Mediawiki-logo.png|15px]] (which appears to be a poorly photoshopped copy) is rectangular (135 x 102 pixels). I will check out your voffset suggestion aswell. I think the advantage of having a meta-template which is used by these templates is that we can somewhat separate design and content making it easier for intermediate users to modify template content. The usual tradeoff being the additional load from multi transclusion. --Zven 02:07, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok added in this Template:Sandbox revision (see http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Sandbox&oldid=149416 example]), a negative value adjusts the image up, a positive value adjusts it down --Zven 10:15, 27 November 2007 (UTC)