Difference between revisions of "Talk:Main Page"

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(Maltese fonts)
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: This is an excellent idea!  Why didn't I think of this?  :-)  Let see if Darren would rather do it himself or whether I should just go ahead and do it. --[[User:Tonisant|Toni Sant]] ([[User talk:Tonisant|talk]]) 12:07, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
: This is an excellent idea!  Why didn't I think of this?  :-)  Let see if Darren would rather do it himself or whether I should just go ahead and do it. --[[User:Tonisant|Toni Sant]] ([[User talk:Tonisant|talk]]) 12:07, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
:: ditto. It's now on my radar [[User:Stephensd|Stephensd]] 16:30, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
:: ditto. It's now on my radar [[User:Stephensd|Stephensd]] 16:30, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
::Login/register basic link now on front page [[User:Stephensd|Stephensd]] 23:15, 19 October 2010 (UTC)


===Facebook integration===
===Facebook integration===

Revision as of 19:15, 19 October 2010

Main Page and Welcome

We need to rethink what to include for a welcome message on the main page and also how to welcome new users. One thing we should possibly consider is the use of Twinkle, which I've just discovered through my active engagement with Wikipedia. It seems that Twinkle helped generate the glorious welcome message you can see on my Wikipedia User Page. Also, I'm thinking that we should encourage the use of the Template:Helpme tag at the bottom of user's talk pages with questions below it, once we figure out how it works. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:57, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


Maintenance

Stubs

How do we indicate that a page is a stub? - Toni Sant (talk)

Quick reading shows that a stub is a user created template. If, for example you set up Template:Stub, you can call the stub template using
STUB

This page is a stub

Stub pages are like acorns. The first seed has been planted, but you can help them grow! There may, for example, also be other M3P resources linking to it. You can help by expanding this page.

. Best to look at the basic Mediawiki Template help for this [[1]]. You could in fact use the link here to write the basic template. This would also apply to writing the templates for things like groups, artists, etc. Stephensd 16:50, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I've attempted this (apparently successfully!) on the page for Rita Pace --Toni Sant (talk) 19:41, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup

I'm exploring the idea of adding a template for cleanup requests on pages. This is for pages that are no longer stubs but don't conform to our (as yet to be written) desired style quality. My first inclusion of the tag (i.e. curly brackets around the word cleanup) is on the page Walter Vella. I'm holding off on creating the actual template page just yet, because I'd like to explore a different format than the one I created for stubs last month. --Toni Sant (talk) 11:37, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Patrolling pages?

What does 'patrolled' mean on some pages (bottom right)? I think this has something to do with pages that may have controversial contents but I need to look into it more closely as it's certainly one of the things we need to know about in terms of general maintenance etc. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I've looked into this and it seems like it's a relatively newish feature of MediaWiki to enable administrators to mark pages that they look at. This way if admins mark a page as patrolled it means that somebody at admin level has already seen this page. It's probably useful if/when we establish a way to ensure that site admins look at all new pages. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Gadgets

  • I keep coming across Wikipedia (only?) tool called Twinkle. We need to explore whether this is available for our MediaWiki installation and what function it has in aiding us with common maintenance tasks, or whether it's just an anti-vandalism tool.--Toni Sant (talk) 11:37, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • From my work with my UG students on Wikipedia I've discovered that there's a whole set of pre-installed gadgets that users have access to as a tab in their user preferences. Twinkle is one of these gadgets, but an even more impressive one is called HotCat, which seems to me like an essential gadget for us provide for all M3P users. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC)


Making it look good

Look and feel

  • Can we revisit the overall look and feel of the wiki? Specifically: choice of fonts for headers and use of red and blue lettering. Also having problems getting bold and italics to render properly on pages - Alex Grech (talk) This appears to be a Chrome/Firefox issue. We therefore need to keep in mind cross-browser matters. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:21, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Can you point me at some specific examples, please? The skins css is fairly compendious and I'd need to know which styles are being affected to be able to narrow things down a touch. Stephensd 15:14, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Ok, had a look with Toni. Reverted body fonts to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif to make sure extended chars in the UTF set are in the fonts. This may have been the problem, with embedded fonts not having them all, so font substitution being used to fill. Stephensd 17:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Now fiddled with link colours etc. a little more; hope this is more agreeable for the moment, unless there are major objections. Stephensd 22:26, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Could we find some alternative colour to green for roll overs? We still have too many different font colours, which are potentially distracting.Alex Grech (talk)
The header font has been chosen to sit better with the logo and colours. I'll have a look at the hover and active link colors though.

Other than these, the colours are basically, grey, black and red. For now, ,this fits with the general scheme of things, I think. The external (blue) links are more difficult to sort out - the settings I'm applying in the skin don't seem to be doing what they should be. Stephensd 15:01, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

  • Right now, links are in red, but when a link page is visited, it reverts to black and bold text. Could we indicate that a visited link page is still a link page by, say, underlining the link (as is the case in Wikipedia)? Some users are not realising that some bold text actually represents a link. --Alex Grech (talk) 15:37, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
As it is, the navigation menus (and toolbox)on the left is a bit confusing. Could all the text in the menus be black, and only turn red when either it is rolled over by the cursor (momentarily), or when that particular page is clicked and displayed; ie. if page 'Main Page' is displayed, then the corresponding item in the menu (Main Page) changes to red for as long as that page is displayed...or become underlined for that matter. Tony Grimaud(talk) 18:15, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree! It's time for us to revisit how we display links, hovers, and visited links. --Toni Sant (talk) 19:36, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Another thing that we should look at is the talk/discussion issue. The button at the top of the page reads 'discussion', however, when this button is click, it takes you to a page saying: 'Editing Talk:The Artiste's Name'. This is a bit confusing too. Is it possible to change this to always read: 'Editing discussion:The Artiste's Name'? This way, there will be more consistency. Tony Grimaud(talk) 21:05, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Special characters

  • We need to add a list of special characters (esp. Maltese letters) in the edit page. - Toni Sant (talk)
My initial choice of embedded font for the body didn't help; there may have been some of the more common ISO-8859-1 chars missing. I've changed that default font now, to use more consistent browser fonts. This should help. Stephensd 15:01, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
  • We need to make sure that we address the use of Maltese characters, especially in names, in the help section on the style guidelines page, which will perhaps be a sub-page/section on the editorial policy --Toni Sant (talk) 12:41, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I think the best and easier way for the contributors is to have the Maltese characters (ċ ġ ħ ż) displayed as buttons along side the Bold and Italic buttons on top of the text fields, if that is at all possibility. Tony Grimaud(talk) 21:18, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Error pages

What's the best sort of 404 page we can have? - Toni Sant (talk)

I've put a (basic) m3p 404 page in place Stephensd 15:01, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
They're looking great. Thanks! --Toni Sant (talk) 19:41, 22 September 2010 (UTC)


Making it work more effeciently

Logging in

Is it possible to have a 'logging in / sign up' on the front page (www.m3p.com.mt)? --Tony Grimaud(talk) 22:02, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

This is an excellent idea! Why didn't I think of this?  :-) Let see if Darren would rather do it himself or whether I should just go ahead and do it. --Toni Sant (talk) 12:07, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
ditto. It's now on my radar Stephensd 16:30, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
Login/register basic link now on front page Stephensd 23:15, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Facebook integration

We need to add a FB like box to the main page and/or to the landing page but first we must install this widget to enable the inclusion of the iframe. Width, height and connection number may need to be adjusted too. Here's the code for the M3P FB like box:

  • installed Widgets extension, and have created Widget:Iframe container page Stephensd 16:36, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=151613981521442&width=570&connections=10&stream=false&header=false&height=165" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:570px; height:165px;" allowTransparency="true"> </iframe>

Integrating FB ID login on the wiki is (as per Ds' suggestion) via the FBConnect extension is probably also a good idea. --Toni Sant (talk) 10:33, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

  • I'm tracking this via its home page and twitter feed and will go ahead once the ext seems stable enough for use. It may not be too long Stephensd 16:39, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

User Group Rights

On Tuesday 31 August 2010 Toni Sant (talk) locked unregistered user access to:

  1. Create discussion pages (createtalk)
  2. Create pages (which are not discussion pages) (createpage)
  3. Edit pages (edit)
  4. Use of the write API (writeapi)

See Special:ListGroupRights for current rights. Amendment made to includes/DefaultSettings.php --Toni Sant (talk) 11:05, 2 September 2010 (UTC)


Contact page and emails

We should probably avoid exposing email addresses as these are routinely harvested for spam! A work around is to have them obfuscated through javascript (extension?) or simply use an online contact form where no email address appears in public. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

The contact us page currently point to my personal online contact form. We obviously need to amend this soon. --Toni Sant (talk) 12:06, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Navigation

What is the process for altering the navigation links in the left hand sidebar and at the bottom of pages? --Toni Sant (talk) 08:18, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Help section

How do we improve the help links? --Alex Grech (talk) 08:25, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Tony Grimaud is now looking into this and has started by seeing what we can adapt from Wikipedia as a simple set of help pages to get us going. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:46, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Categories

We going to need to look at the taxonomy of categories sometime soon as things can easily get out of hand if we allow this to slip from the top of our agenda as more new entries are made. In the process we should also be keeping an eye on Special:UncategorizedCategories / Special:UnusedCategories and Special:WantedCategories --Toni Sant (talk) 13:46, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

URLs and Permalinks

How do we make the URLs for individual pages shorter/prettier? - Toni Sant (talk)

Can we activate redirection for non-CasE-sENsiTive titles? This is available on wikipedia - so, is it a configuration option in MediaWiki? - Toni Sant (talk)

Emails generated automatically by the system still indicate the webmaster address from spettaklu.org. We should probably change this to something more appropriate either using m3p.com.mt or identifying spettaklu.org more clearly with m3p on the email address itself. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Can we make all external links open in a new tab or window by default? --Toni Sant (talk) 16:33, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Naming conventions

We need to ensure that names of people who are known by nicknames follow this format: Firstname "Nickname" Surname. All variations on the name should refer to the page named this way. This should probably also be on a Help document in relation to style that comes as a linked document from the editorial policy.--Toni Sant (talk) 12:35, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

We also need to look into a naming convention for gig reviews to enable disambiguation for page that bear the same name as an artist page or similar. --Toni Sant (talk) 12:38, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Refering Pages

Is there a way we can direct a search made about a person known by slight differences in their name to the same page? As it is at the moment, say; "Tony Grimaud" , "Grimaud", "il-Grimaud" ... they all would point to separate pages. at best, it tells you that no page had been found. moreover, it encourages you to start creating such a page. This produces undesirable multiple pages for the same person/entry--Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:56, 7 October 2010 (UTC).

My first suggestion would be that we grab the contents of the Wikipedia page on redirects and start adapting it for our needs. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:19, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
I have been trying my hands at refering pages with some notable success! :) ...Now i would like to share this info with the rest of the world...where would be the best place to write this, ie in the Help pages?...is there an admin login to do so--Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:56, 8 October 2010 (UTC)?

Search Options

Can we look at the search options with regards the Go button? Maybe renaming it to "Go to the Page" or something similar to indicate exactly what it does. Then again, do we really need it? --Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:44, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Signature

Could the signiture function be disabled when editing the main pages ... as it is in wikipedia? Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:35, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

This probably needs an advanced version of the editing interface to be enabled through an extensions. So, it's probably one to discuss with Darren. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:22, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Media uploads

The 'upload file' link in the toolbox has been disabled. Are we going to allow users to upload media in the near future? Or are we going to decide on this after the 25 September launch? Alex Grech (talk)

It's time to take a close look at this matter now. I'm on it...but I'll need to have a good chat with DS to really get going on this. --Toni Sant (talk) 14:34, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


And the rest...

Removed these three links from the Getting Started section on the Main Page because they may be confusing to people visiting the site for the very first time.

We probably need to keep these handy somewhere eventually, but I thought I'd just dump them here for now.--Toni Sant (talk) 11:05, 2 September 2010 (UTC)