Page MenuHomePhabricator

Template discovery: browse templates by category
Closed, ResolvedPublicFeature

Description

Add a columnar category browser in a new tab below the template search form (next to the existing Favorites tab).

This will show a column-based browser for the category hierarchy, starting at a designated root category such as Category:Templates. Each column will list both templates and subcategories, in their sortkey order. Clicking on a template will load the template form, and clicking on a category will open a new column with that category's members.

A rather rough mock-up:

image.png (364×740 px, 22 KB)

The UI will be something similar to Apple's column view.

This task is about browsing templates and their categories. For searching, see T392245: Template discovery: search templates by category.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Change #1138744 had a related patch set uploaded (by Samwilson; author: Samwilson):

[mediawiki/extensions/TemplateData@master] [WIP] Template discovery: Add category-browsing columns in a new tab

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1138744

A rough demo of the work so far: https://commtech.toolforge.org/Special:TemplateDiscovery

One slightly odd aspect of this system is that you get the word 'template' in a lot of category titles:

image.png (398×733 px, 67 KB)

Apple says that column views should "consider showing information about the selected item when there are no nested items to display. The Finder, for example, shows a preview of the selected item and information like the creation date, modification date, file type, and size." I think that makes sense, and that we should show an information pane about a selected template (rather than directly selecting the template and navigating away from the column browser). That's where the other categories could be shown as well as the description, number of transclusions, etc. It can have plenty of stuff because there's space there, whereas in the menu items it's much more constrained.

Change #1138744 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/TemplateData@master] Template discovery: Add columnar category browser in new tab

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1138744

There is more to be done here, but it'll happen in other tasks. This task is just the basic operation.

It's still in QA, but yeah I guess we're going to have a testing party and other issues will no doubt be caught. So yep!