Template talk:New Motd

Discussion

Right. I've set up a clone of PotD, more or less. Need to go through and poke at everything, and make sure all the bits are set up. However, it's enough to begin with, and I can now begin adapting it to media, as opposed to pictures.

There are two main issues with this.

1. We will need to create a template that works well with both sound and video; however, the standard displays of sound and video on Wikipedias normally look something like this:

Sound'

Video

Duck and Cover, an infamous 1950's film suggesting what to do in the case of a nuclear attack.

2. The standard inputs are very different: Sounds normally take two inputs, and videos only one. Here's how those two templates are set up:

{{Listen|filename=Enrico_Caruso_-_Nellie_Melba_-_La_bohème_-_O_soave_fanciulla_(restored).ogg|title=''La bohème'' - O soave fanciulla|description=''O soave fanciulla'' from [[:en:Giacomo Puccini|]]'s '''[[:en:La bohème|]], sung by [[:en:Enrico Caruso|]] and [[:en:Nellie Melba|]]}} [[Image:DuckandC1951.ogg|left]] {{-}} ''[[:en:Duck_and_Cover_(film)|Duck and Cover]]'', an infamous 1950's film suggesting what to do in the case of a nuclear attack]].

There's also some odd backend stuff unique to sounds. Here's what a sound file looks like without any parameters passed:

Yeah. MediaWiki has really ugly defaults, and about the best you can do is centre that (i) button, or suppress it and add a link manually. More about that in a minute.

Here's what we could do, in order of complexity:

1. Generic template: Description goes under the sound/video, no prettying up is done.
2. More complicated setup: When adding a video file (there's more sound files, so sound will probably be the default) a second edit has to be made to designate the file as a video. This allows prettier display, and avoids the hackish code, but at the cost of making setting up a MotD that much trickier.
3. As 2. only with a three-part setup, to allow a title AND a description to be separate. This is probably too complex
4. Videos become part of POTD, allowing MOTD to specialize in sound files. This is a major policy change, and would probably require allowing videos to be FPs!
5. We ask MediaWiki developers to give us a parserfunction or the like that will return whether an ogg file is a video or a sound file. [Unless this already exists, this is probably impossible in the short term.]

Unless the code mentioned in 5 already exists, I'd suggest we go with 1 or 4.

Now back to (i) below the sound file in the version without the parameters. That's the standard link to the file page. If we disable that, we're going to need to add a link to the file description page manually - since there would otherwise be no link to it. If we go with solution 1, I don't see any way to keep that link from appearing below videos as well. What's the preferred solution? Adam Cuerden (talk) 11:24, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd say there's no urgent need to make the template look any prettier than what we have now — I haven't seen anyone complain about MOTD looking too ugly for the Main Page, so it would seem it's good enough. If and when someone wants to make it nicer, let them, but let's not allow it delay work on other parts of the system. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:11, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Performance

Hmm. Hit the first issue: PotD's code for the setup pages is reeeally server-intensive. Going to have to make things a little more efficient. Adam Cuerden (talk) 02:27, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Looking at your edits to Template:Potd/Day, I'd say you have a point. Also, Template:Potd itself seems to transclude some complex subtemplates (like Template:Potd filename and Template:Potd description) which seem completely unnecessary to me and just serve to make some rarely seen(?) template pages prettier. I don't think we need to copy all that cruft. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:52, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I was kind of shocked at how complex Template:Potd/Day was in the service of... almost nothing. I can kind of see how it came about, though: That's not too horrible of a way to do it if you're only dealing with a few languages on the secondary language list, but the prettying up was never undone when the number grew to dozens. Adam Cuerden (talk) 03:58, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Note, by the way, that sometimes short little templates are the best solution - It's far more efficient to call {{Text I want ({{{lang}}})}} than to use a #switch parser function. Adam Cuerden (talk) 04:10, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, at least if there are dozens of translations. It's hard to say where the exact break-even point is, but I certainly wouldn't suggest replacing the Template:Potd/YYYY-MM-DD (lang) system with {{#switch:}}. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:16, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Whatever the break-even point is, I think it's well below the number of languages we have =) Adam Cuerden (talk) 13:24, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Translation page

Let's talk about translation pages. It'll be better to have everything in one place. There's two ways to do it; I have a rough mock-up of the first.

Template:New_Potd/2010-05

PotD, then MotD. This is likely to get confusing, and we'll end up with Pictures in MotD, and Media in PotD.

A better solution is probably to have it go something like

01

---

Picture of the day

[All the setup stuff]

Media of the day

[All the setup stuff]

02

---

Picture of the day

[All the setup stuff]

Media of the day

[All the setup stuff]

etc.

---

Translation isn't even an issue: there's templates for that. =) Thoughts? Adam Cuerden (talk) 04:06, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. If they're on the same page at all, then it's better to put the POTD and MOTD for each day together. Might even consider putting them side by side, like this:

Day #

---

Picture of the day	Media of the day
[POTD setup stuff here]	[MOTD setup stuff here]

---

—Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:13, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Translations

Just going to list things needing translators here for now. It'll be easier to get it translated in a batch.

Template:Change_media_file