User talk:Blbarnitz

MediaWiki:Common.css
Not sure if you saw my comment at MediaWiki talk:Common.css or not, but I wanted to let you know that MediaWiki:Common.css is a powerful page that allows for all sorts of formatting. For example, Wikipedia's article on George W. Bush takes advantage of it in a number of ways that we might be able to add here as well. The first is the infobox at the top of the page, on the right. Including a box like that on each page about a particular mutual fund would allow us to put the important info&mdash;fund category, benchmark index, expense ratio, fees, etc.&mdash;in a consistent, easy access format.

The second thing that might be useful are the boxes at the bottom of the page, starting with "George W. Bush" and ending with "Texas Rangers". These boxes are collapsible (and are collapsed by default, as you see), reducing the amount of space that they take up on the page. These could be used on individual fund pages as well, to help organize the vast number of links at the bottom of pages like Vanguard Pacific Stock Index Fund.

The problem is that to edit that page, the user has to be an administrator. If you like, you can simply copy the corresponding page from Wikipedia, but it's a fairly large file and includes some unnecessary code (like formatting for image galleries&mdash;probably not something we need here). That might be the easiest solution, at least until you're confident enough that I'm not going to run around breaking things =).

Once the necessary code is there, I think it will be fairly easy to copy/paste the templates from Wikipedia that allow these kinds of informational and navigational aids to be added to our pages here. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions. --Spangineer (talk) 19:32, 15 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I haven't looked at this in depth. When I created a navigation box, I wanted to use a navbox just like the wikipedia, but it appeared to have dependency issues.  That is, navbox depends on some template, which in turn depends on some template or JavaScript.  Do you know if it's easy to resolve the dependency issues?  Maybe I should take a look again.  At the time, I was sort of in rush to create navigation boxes for fund and 529 pages. PiperWarrior 19:57, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Both suggestions look promising. I am no "techie" and have very little background with wikimedia markup; the codes in common css are essentially meaningless to me, so I mostly learn it by copying an established example. If you know the code, and can create the templates. I see no downside in using them. Blbarnitz 21:00, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * PiperWarrior, the boxes depend on "classes" within the tables, and those classes are all defined in Common.css. Once those are in place, it should be fairly simple to start adding boxes that look like the ones on Wikipedia. But until Common.css has the appropriate code in it (which only an administrator can add), I don't know of an easy way to make it happen. --Spangineer (talk) 22:22, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * OK. I just looked at the source code for navbox.  It looks like we need ParserFunctions so that we can use things like #if and #switch.  I'll ask Tashina, the site administrator, to install this. PiperWarrior 05:58, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry Blbarnitz, I should have specified--the talk page doesn't need to be edited, just the actual page itself (MediaWiki:Common.css). --Spangineer (talk) 00:20, 16 September 2008 (UTC)