Forum:Portable Infoboxes

Hi all,

We're contacting a few of our top communities, hoping to get you on board with the migration to the new infobox markup. And we have tools to help!

Why we’re doing this

Simply put: Most current infobox structure translates very poorly to mobile experiences, and indeed any device that doesn't use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that Wikia's traffic is trending mobile.

There is an important graph from our forum post about infoboxes a couple weeks back:



Mobile is the future. Not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic - it's staggering.

We worked with the Wikia community to create this new markup to make sure that your hard work can be displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) easily and without any new coding conventions. It'll take some effort up front, to be sure, but we're here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future.

Tools we've designed to ease the process

We’ve enabled two new features on your community. One is a tool for migrating the "old" infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your wikia that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the "Generate draft markup" button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup.

The second is a new feature on Special:Insights that will highlight which infoboxes on your wikia have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. It's fairly intuitive - you can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the "Convert!" button on the right, which performs the same action as the "Generate draft markup" button.

This is our help page for the new markup. I'll make sure that one of my more techy colleagues is available to help if you need it, as well as watching this forum post for any questions.

Thanks -- sannse (help forum | blog) 20:53, August 4, 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, a rather belated update on this. I have been working on an example to show you.  See Template:InfoBox Char/Draft.  As you can see, it looks the same as your current template, and I think I've got it all working the same as well - please let me know if you find anything I haven't got right!
 * The only thing that's different is the actual template code. That's in a new form which will ensure we can display infoboxes correctly on all devices, including future ones.
 * I'd like to switch the templates over and put this one live. That will update the vast majority of your infoboxes (221, to be exact). Can I make that change?  -- sannse  (help forum | blog)  18:33, September 22, 2015 (UTC)