@Florian thanks for creating this task. I will flesh this out more and answer the open questions.

I took a look to our existing MediaWiki API, and we can get the pages of a category very easily I think :)

@Florian that sounds amazing. i was merely pointing towards the direction but now i will spend more time going through flows and cases and populate this task.

thanks again for being patient with this :) and apologies for the delay.

@Nirzar: Just for you to take into account about the open point "What happens with sub-categories": We can retrieve sub-categories via the api, too, so we coult probably have two sections, one with pages, and one with subcategories. Or mark subcatgeories in another way. If a user clicks this category, we could show another overlay with the new list of pages/subcategories :)

Change 303265 had a related patch set uploaded (by Florianschmidtwelzow):
[WIP] Prototype of CategoryListGateway

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/303265

@Nirzar: Just for you to take into account about the open point "What happens with sub-categories": We can retrieve sub-categories via the api, too, so we coult probably have two sections, one with pages, and one with subcategories. Or mark subcatgeories in another way. If a user clicks this category, we could show another overlay with the new list of pages/subcategories :)

I was thinking of the same. we can use segmented controller which says "articles" "sub categories" and show it that way.

@Nirzar, would it be better for small screen devices if we removed the space at the top, or somehow made the title bar on the same line as the close icon similar to other overlays? Also, would you please upload mock-ups for the tablet sized devices? I have a suspicion that the current UI won't look that good given how much horizontal space at the top will be wasted.

Hey Florian,

I have been working on it for past few days and had multiple iterations based on your feedback on the rough idea that i had posted.

I came to a conclusion that we need a page template. page template meaning, all the non article pages. i.e. special: pages need a better template. sorry to dig this deeper but i can't solve a problem which takes care of this alone.

I set out to create a category page with two segmented controls. i.e. Granite domes and it has two section "articles" and "subcategories"

I looked at the existing page template that fit this need. i came across watchlist which has main segmented control "list/ modified" and a title on top.

from their i looked at user pages and contribution pages and talk pages. and everything seem to have different layouts. so i ended up taking a shot at creating one single page template which has section selector and a title. Here's how it will look ->

Sorry about opening so many things but i can't just add more inconsistency in our interfaces.

@bmansurov currently in the description the mock shows a modal window. but i think categories being a separate page of itself (it has different ways to reach) it needs to be a page and not modal. this above approach solves your concern too.

Btw.: This also doesn't take the wikitext part of a category page into account :) See the Granite domes example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Granite_domes&action=edit

With respect to the category page proposal:

I should note we are doing something similar with the user page so I don't feel to bad about adjusting the markup for category pages. That said it seems like it might also be useful for desktop.

@Moushira is that worth investigating with the community (showing them Nirzar's designs)?

The category pages are quite hard to navigate in current form and it would be great to bring them to life in this way.

Has lots of open questions.

Change 303265 abandoned by Jdlrobson:
[WIP] Prototype of CategoryListGateway

Reason:
I encapsulated this gerrit link into https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142124 so that it's not lost but it doesn't look like this is actively looking for review. Hope that's okay.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/303265