Revision as of 05:59, 1 July 2006

The Proposal: Documentation

What's Going on Here?=

Look farther down on this page, you see the code for the Portal page (with many transclusions). So you're thinking, "this is going to be confusing to new editors." Absolutely not. The good thing about the portal is that experienced users, if they want, can take the load off the new users by creating subpages in advance. For example, I created User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/July 2, 2006 by just going to the new page and typing {{subst:User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/DateHeader|2006|07|02}}. The border, date, day of the week, and edit link are all added automatically. So essentially, more experienced editors, if they want, can create future date pages ahead of time so new editors won't have to deal with that. All they have to do is add one line, Portal:Current events/July 2, 2006, and it shows up on the page. To achieve the effect of having all the daily current events on the left side and the sidebars on the right, a table was used instead of the simple floating infobox style. This same kind of technique can also be used for the other current event portal pages.

So Why the Transclusions?

Well, it helps make the page less cluttered. However, the main goal of the transcluding is to make other jobs easier. Archivals in the portal space would be easier than before because it isn't being done all at one time (see The Calendar) and also because the events could be simultaneously updated on the entrance to the portal as well as on the monthly subpages. In addition, the events could be in reverse chronological order on the entrance to the portal but forward chronological order on the subpages.

The Calendar

This could still be up for discussion, but the proposal is set up so the past seven days are the only days that remain at the front of the portal (under the old system June 30 events were not current events on July 1, but June 1 events were current events on June 30). So the calendar on the right would only link to the seven days on the portal homepage (this will need manual updating like in the original) and sometimes show the previous few days at the beginning of the month (like in this mockup).

A Downside?

Well, if we're still going to maintain the monthly archives in the article space, we'd have a huge problem because obviously we cannot have all this formatting in the article space. However, if we were to maintain the monthly archives on the Portal and just redirect the future monthly articles to their respective years, this would not be a problem. In my personal opinion, I like this idea because right now that month articles don't really say anything about the months (like articles). Instead, they are just the places we dump the old current events pages (like an archive, which is not what the article space should be used for).

The Code and Subpages

The code for this proposal of the portal page is very short because it includes many

{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/Newsbrowsebar}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/Highlights}}
{| style="background-color:transparent"
|valign="top"|
<!--
To add a new date, add the new day's template below (e.g. {{Portal:Current events/July 21, 2006}}) and remove the oldest date from the bottom, so only seven days remain on the portal page. Do NOT use leading zeros (i.e. use July 1, 2006, not July 01, 2006).

If after saving the page a red-link shows up with the new date, click the link and enter something like...

{{subst:Portal:Current events/DateHeader|2006|07|21}}
|}

...where the first number is the year, the second number is that of the month, and the third number is that of the date of the new day. The closing |} is very important.
-->
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/July 1, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/June 30, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/June 29, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/June 28, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/June 27, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/June 26, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/June 25, 2006}}
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/Events by month}}
|valign="top"|
{{User:Joturner/Current Events Portal Redesign/Current events}}
|}

[[Category:2006|*]]
[[Category:Portals under construction|Current events]]

<!--*** Foreign language links removed ***-->

/Newsbrowsebar

This includes the same "broswe bar" tables from the current Portal:Current events with the dark grey removed and a light blue added. The top table is now also 100% of the screen width.

/Highlights

This includes the same highlight table from the current Portal:Current events with the dark grey removed and a light blue added. The message regarding the Highlights / Main Page candidates are also included in this part and the two external links are also here as well.

/July 1, 2006, et, al.

These are the daily events transcluded onto the entrance to the portal. They could also be transcluded into monthly pages / archivals. Obviously, major changes were made to this part.

/Events by month

Nothing drastic was done to this section. The commas and colons were replaced with pipes and bullets, respectively, and the full months were cut down to three-letter abbreviations due to word-wrapping of the full month names in some resolutions.

/Current events

This is essentially the same as the original right sidebar, with some removals. Events was moved up because I felt they were more important than Recent Deaths. Some of the links, like the Wikinews, About This Page, and Wikimedia Commons links were moved to other parts of the page.

So that's about it. Discussion, feedback, and suggestions on the proposal would be appreciated in the appropriate section below. Forgive my poor grammar if it exists in this post; it's getting quite late for me. joturn e r 05:59, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]