Forum:Main page redesign, fonts, + a million other things

So I started a mirror wiki to experiment with the digital clock and title fonts - everything kind of snowballed and I sort of made it a test bed for a ton of different ideas I've had recently. I figured I would keep it in one thread so we can talk about them individually, they all sort of tie together in different ways.

Feel free to visit, mess around, test things out! I'm really excited to start updating the site for the new series --Pyramidhead (talk) 00:22, October 23, 2016 (UTC)

Main page redesign
The main page is old and it's starting to show. I've never been a huge fan of the "portals" to be honest, they seem like an unnecessary barrier to the actual content - and two of them lead to ugly statistics pages. I decided to simplify it into three hubs with links below so you can immediately dive in. Besides that I also completely redesigned the countdown, the poll, and the other boxes.
 * Link: Main Page

Episode pages - fonts
I personally think this looks awesome - we can replace the digital clock notes and the title card text with the real thing. There's also a Day 9 variant. These would be easy to switch over with the bot if we wanted - I also added a "following" template to standardize the "The following takes place" notes


 * Link: 1x01, 2x08, 9x01, 9x04

Appearances template
I originally proposed this a while back and thought I'd revisit. A major issue I recently found with the current template: It doesn't appear on mobile, at all. In fact the entire section and the h2 apparently just get dropped. This new one fixes that, and also it lets us keep track of mentions, photo & video appearances, etc. I think it should be treated as a corollary of the episode Appearances lists - everything you can link to from one should appear on the other. (I went over the other advantages in the original thread.) Added a logo so the actual seasons stand out clearer, and an episode count table (optional) since the parentheses numbers can be misleading. Going back on forth on whether to use the full titles or not.
 * Examples
 * Link: Jack Bauer, Los Angeles, Solarz, Miriam Bender

Newpage text
The newpage buttons I'm looking at right now (Actor, Character, Your personal user page) is just terrible. As far as I can tell it hasn't been changed in ten years! Made a new one with a lot more options and that actually fits in the space
 * ''Link: New Page

New episode tables, sidebar
General design tweaks, colors, etc. I redesigned the tables on each season page, giving the image more prominence and better using the width. As for the sidebar, I still strongly feel we should break the sidebar into separate templates for each page type. It's so much easier than the alternative, having to remember and apply three different modifiers for stacked or not stacked, subgroups or no subgroups, etc.

Couple random sidebar tweaks as well:
 * New sections for Government service, Military service - not sure if conflict with Profession/Affiliation
 * Combined birthdate/place/cause into Born and Died fields
 * ''Link: Season 1, Characters

Monobook friendly
Finally - all this is completely monobook friendly. We haven't been very good about keeping up with the old skin here, so I wanted to be sure it works as well on both.
 * ''Link: Jack Bauer