About
The WikiForum extension has been poorly designed and needs to be revamped. It'll provide better consistency with MediaWiki overall and also better UX. (NOTE: This issue I'd say IMO is almost high or as high as a priority as #434) Here are the issues, and here's how they can be improved. I'll also provide sketches/rough drafts of what new appearance pretty soon today.
Another NOTE: I greatly encourage for other people to provide feedback on each idea's, and to also provide rough drafts for a new look that fixes most of the issues listed below. Then, we can take the best of each one and combine to create a beautiful forum extension that's also functional :) 👍
- Issues
- Icons:
- Problem: All these icons have too much detail and thus distracting.
- Solution: Replace all current icons with the WikiFont (munmay/WikiFont) icon set. Icons are simpler and to the point.
- Typography:
- Problem: An odd mixture of two different fonts, Arial and Verdana. Verdana is a poorly designed font and isn't very nice to read.
- Solution: Make the base font just Arial so that other wikis can change it to what they like.
- Non-responsive UI:
- Problem: Doesn't degrade gracefully across devices. Was designed desktop first without consideration for phones and tablets.
- Solution: Recode the entire thing basically, easier to start back from scratch.
- Search:
- Problem: It isn't functional at all. Tried searching up "LEGO" on the Brickipedia WikiForum (http://en.brickimedia.org/wiki/Special:WikiForum) and it said it popped up with 0 hits yet gave me one single random thread, instead of giving an actual list of threads in a search result format.
- Solution: Like above, it's easier to start back from scratch.
- More functions please! As a user, I should be able to: (there's probably some other stuff that this extension needs but I can't think of too many so far, I'll edit when I come up more )
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Rough draft
Starting on paper, then we get to a good rough draft we can move to the final draft which would be in code form. How's that transition idea? (this section will be updated later today)