Forum:Portable Infoboxes and Panels--Feedback Wanted

For those who don’t know, Wikia/FANDOM rolled out a new update close to a month ago for Portable Infoboxes. This included a new Panels feature: panels are intended to allow editors a flexible way, more layered way to organize/display information in infoboxes. For instance, DnD and card game-based wikis could use panels in infoboxes to display creature statistics per edition (e.g. 5e, 4e, 3e).

A little while ago, I was updating the infoboxes of the first five or so LNs to include the ASCII Media Works ISBNs along with the original MediaWorks ISBNs. While I was at it, I thought I may as well update Template:Book to include a row for pages...and then I stopped. It occurred to me last Wednesday that Panels might have some use for book infoboxes; the more release information one adds to a template, the longer that template becomes. Adding information on the Chinese and Korean releases using the current template, for instance, would make it quite a bit longer than it already is.

With panels, one could organize release information by country/language: one panel for Japanese; the second for English; perhaps even a third and fourth for Chinese and Korean. Thus, I went ahead designed three versions of the book template using panels: the Alpha version; Alt1; and Alt2. Each is using Volume 4's data as a demonstration--as you can see, I'm currently live-testing Alt1 on Vol4's page. For comparison, here is the last revision of that page which uses the standard book template.

My questions regarding the above are as follows: Do you prefer the standard/current book template as it is, or do you like any of the paneled templates above? If so, which of the three do you prefer?

(I am leaning towards Alt1 (RevTest/Alt), which has gotten the most positive feedback from those I've asked on other platforms. The alpha version does not affect the images, whereas Alt1 is organized in such a way that the images change to reflect the selected release. Alt2 was designed when I considered potential scrolling/height issues, but having two panel sections does somewhat break the infobox up).

Panels and Character Infoboxes
Although I spent the past week thinking about panels for book templates on and off + designing them, it only occurred to me today that panels also have potential for Template:Infobox character. Baccano! poses a bit of a challenge from a wiki perspective, since characters can not only feature across two or even all three of the three main eras, there can be multiple media iterations of their designs for each era.

Some (including myself) enjoy seeing how characters differ across era and media adaptation, so a while back I updated the CSS for the Tabber extension, and experimented with multi-era two-tier tabs over at my Sandbox (using Huey's, Ennis; and Maiza's infoboxes; Nader's already used Tabber in this way). The main issue with Tabber is that it's exceptionally not mobile friendly (i.e. with >1 tier, mult images), and it's a pain to code--just look at the source code for those infoboxes on my Sandbox. It wasn't fun.

Panels, I thought, could make having multiple 'groups' of images for character infoboxes a lot easier. I thus went ahead today and designed Template:Infobox_character/Alt_Test, using Maiza's data for demonstration purposes. From a code standpoint, inputting Maiza's data was so much simpler than it was for the infobox you see in Sandbox (again, check source code).

So once again, questions: Do you prefer the Tabber examples you see on my sandbox, or do you like what you see with that Alt Test character infobox? Both aesthetically and functionally (and code-wise, if relevant to you). Additionally: are you satisfied with the design of the image tabs as they are now, or would you be interested in me redesigning them to complement the design of the panel buttons? I've provided a concept design to the right as an example of what I mean (I haven't written the CSS code for it; what is screenshotted is the result of me playing around with Chrome's developer tools).

I realize that two tiers of tabs/panel buttons can be a tad tall (i.e. creates a good bit of space between the infobox title and the image), though I've made an effort to reduce fonts/margins/etc. If you like the idea of panels but are iffy on how I've executed them so far, I am very much open to suggestions. (This also goes for semi-relevant matters here, like whether you think the book templates are missing some useful data).

Infoboxes are core features of many articles, as they are often the first thing users look at due to displaying key or fundamental information. I don't want to make big changes like these without at least inviting users + editors to express their thoughts/share feedback, so I'm doing so here as I've done on other platforms. I will see if I can make this an Announcement so it can garner for visibility, and I'll likely tweet about it on the wiki's Twitter account as well.

Thank you to those who take the time to read and respond.

Revriley (talk)