Changing how folders work

Have a look at this page with all folders closed. http://216.151.212.47/pmwiki/foldertest.html

An additional change would be made to make the folders look like they have a tab.

Comments?

I like. This makes it much easier to go to each tab with far less scrolling.

It also makes access using a phone far more friendly.

My one issue would be this putting a hard cap on the length of the folder titles. There are some character sheets dependent on longer folder titles. (There's also a few trope pages that use longer folder titles as a gag, like Blatant Lies, but those aren't as big a deal.)

If we do make this change, it would have to tweaked to account for this (either by allowing the new tabs to be variable in size, or having Alt Text mouseover in case of longer folder titles). Otherwise, you'd need to give us some time to go clean up existing folders to fit this change.

I like the proposed folder design. Only issue would be to fit it for pages with longer folder titles.

I think new rows should be created before the folder names get shortened. i.e, it should go down to one column of folders before the folder names get shortened.

(The Protaginist/playable folder get shortened when there's still ~200 pixels of free space on the right at two columns of folders.)

edited 22nd Feb '14 2:52:38 PM by m8e

Can you show us a preview of what that would look like on a page with more folders? Characters.Bio Shock Infinite, for example.

The sample page is now Bioshock. I like the idea of putting too-long titles in the hover-tip. Honestly, not many of the real long folder titles are quite as funny as the people who did them might have hoped for.

edited 22nd Feb '14 6:18:00 PM by FastEddie

Looks great.

What examples of non-joke long folder names are there that actually need to be that long? I could imagine someone's name, but you usually don't use the entire name in those cases.

edited 22nd Feb '14 9:44:30 PM by AnotherDuck

Character pages that are folderized by organization, race, and/or so on. This is a good example of that.

edited 23rd Feb '14 7:07:24 AM by TotemicHero

There's a green banner on the new test page requesting that I look at custom title requests.

The new folders look good. If the joke isn't going too far, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness is a good example of long folder titles.

edited 23rd Feb '14 10:14:21 AM by Rotpar

Yeah, that screenshot was taken from as privileged account (I wonder what "Isolation" is...).

See, "Gallian Militia, Regiment 3, Squad 7 (Protagonists) Main Characters " can be shortened to "Gallian Militia", no problem. There are no other Gallian Militia to confuse them with. Most long labels are similarly just wordy.

New design looks awesome. Sole downside is that, obviously, the folder tags have to be back-to-back for the folders themselves to appear inline like that. But when they do it is AWESOME.

On a tangent, sometimes I think any page with more than # folders should have them all closed by default to keep the page neat.

edited 23rd Feb '14 4:12:35 PM by Stratadrake

You can set your preference for the folder default appearance (open or closed) in your profile. That seems to work better than deciding across the board on one format for everyone.

That won't give any not logged in reader a choice, so we'd have to decide on an uniform format for these anyway.

Default is closed anyway, so that's not really an issue.

Made few visual changes: http://216.151.212.47/pmwiki/foldertest.html

Probably installing this fairly soon, since we don't have any "Hate it!" comments.

Nice. The lack of background color for the folders is a bit disconcerting from the previous iterations, though.

Just a forewarning: While I have absolutely no problem with the colour and folder appearance of the newest design proposal, changing them might cause some negative reaction.

We should put up a headline announcing the change in advance and inviting public comment. The number of tropers who will spontaneously see and comment in a Wiki Talk thread is a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole.

edited 26th Feb '14 9:27:43 AM by Fighteer

bulletin posted

i really don't like them, but I can't think of anything better other than keeping the way they look now.

(Thread Hop) Since you're changing the system, are you going to find a way to code "nested" folders?

This is only about display, not functionality.

One big problem of it for me is the lack of colour in the folders - it's a little hard for me to see where the folders actually are other than by text.