Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-4522253-20181001230600

Hello! I'm Isaac, and I'm representing FANDOM's Community Technical team. We help communities adopt to new technologies and features, like content portability. Narutopedia is a high priority for introducing Portable Infobox templates, which have a lot of benefits for your community; we've recently taken some time to develop some infrastructure (namely bridging high-performance Lua with SemanticMediaWiki) to make a serious performance upgrade that's also more simple to manage.

Narutopedia experiences millions of pageviews per week, with 75% of those visits from mobile devices. Portable Infoboxes help your articles to be accessed from any device and the flow of your traffic is as important as it ever was. I'd like to reproduce as much as possible the look and feel of your desktop infoboxes in global CSS, and will update the Infobox templates themselves (initially as Drafts for you to approve or ask for changes to) so that they can be accessible on any current and future platform. Maintaining them if you want to make changes should be very simple, and we have extensive documentation on how to modify Portable Infoboxes in the help pages or on the Portability Hub. Whether you choose to go with Portable Infoboxes or not, the Lua functions will still improve your page performance without lots of nesting template code and functions; they are designed to eliminate calls to helper templates, so you'll see less reliance on calling the server for incremental processing.

Improved mobile clarity is not the only reason why we'd like to introduce these; we're looking at all kinds of emerging devices. The Mercury skin and engine let us target all these devices, and the experience is centered around PIs as the focal point. The PIs also improve desktop performance, as the language is built for the server to produce them lightning fast. On mobile, the experience of infoboxes (when they aren't interpreted and stripped of other styling, as with non-portable code) goes from "looks fine" to "looks good". Mercury is another example of FANDOM tech that's going to be around for a while. It's constantly evolving, but the best benefits of new Mercury features will go to communities with portable code. Before you ask, customization of the Mercury skin is not something we're offering at this time, but if and when we do it will be first available for portable communities.

 For your review, I've created these first few templates and corresponding CSS (and of course, the Lua Modules). I did make some changes for readability and clarity, and easily visible data. I resized the width to be more in line with typical infoboxes encountered elsewhere, as we've researched and found it to be ideal. I am also working out some issues with,  ,  and. That's why we've extensively tested these, after all: I want them to function perfectly both visibly and invisibly (with SMW). I intend to keep working on the remainder, but wanted to get your eyes on these to start with.

My hope is to present additional proofs of concept for you to see that there's no loss of form or function, including your remaining infobox templates. Would your community consider approving them? I can do the coding and styling work myself, and save you from spending your valuable time. We would appreciate your go-ahead, but it is an incremental process and there are multiple stages where you can ask questions or for changes. We're expecting it may take a month or more to get full consensus. Please let me know. Thanks! 