User blog comment:Ducksoup/The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia/@comment-1295676-20150821232411

So I've spent the past few days playing around with the new infoboxes, and the result is, rather than being either excited or angry, I just feel tired out. By this point I've managed to make a portable infobox that mostly resembles its original counterpart. And to the new template's credit, it looks good. Noticeably different, but it displays the same information in much the same manner, and it looks good.

But it was such a song and dance getting to that point.

My knowledge of coding in regards to Wikia is almost entirely self-taught, a result of trial and error imitation and experimentation. If I am any better than the average user, it would be because I have administrator privileges on a few wikis, and that has allowed for more playing around behind the scenes than I would have had otherwise. And getting one portable infobox looking how I wanted it to was a struggle. I managed it mostly thanks to this blog and the links to the various help pages, guides, and questions by other community members. (On that note, I support any initiative to get this information centralized in some capacity.) Even now, there are still a few lingering problems, and I'm going to need ask specific questions to get those solved.

My contention with the portable infoboxes is that, much like the information about them, they are all over the place. To make changes to the template itself, I have to edit the template page. If I want to change how the template looks, I need to do so with CSS. Which requires separate themes for different infoboxes. Which requires I specify which theme goes to which infobox ... back on the template page. Do you see where I'm going with this? Previewing a portable infobox is a nightmare, because I'm making changes to two pages to edit one template. The migration tool still needs fine-tuning, but that was actually the least of my problems.

The real kicker though, is after I'd added all these nice colors to my portable infobox, I previewed it on mobile and it was in gray. Even worse, the old infobox looks almost identical to the new one in the mobile format, except that, bizarrely, it actually takes up less screen space. Maybe I'm missing the difference; the portable infoboxes load quicker or cache better or have some other advantage that I can't see. But that really is the point. I'm not seeing any advantage to the portable infoboxes. You've outlined reasons in the post above, but none of that is coming through on my end; you claim the portable infoboxes can do things the old ones cannot, but with the whole "appearance through CSS" thing going on, they actually seem less dynamic.

So yes, I could update all the infobox templates on the wikis I manage with the new portable infoboxes. I could even do it relatively painlessly, seeing as I've put most of the initial frustration behind me by now. But I don't see any practical reason why I should.