Board Thread:Darwin/@comment-31651144-20130822212317/@comment-2118812-20130822214932

The short answer is: no, eventually it will not be optional and everyone will be switched to fluid layout.

Here's why:  we aren't able to support any long-term setup where some communities have a fixed width and others have a fluid layout. This will create problems with our ad serving and with maintaining features and functionality and could also cause performance issues.

One of the driving reasons to switch Wikia to a fluid layout is to support the ever-growing range of displays (tablets, laptops, large monitors, TVs). Fixed width is hard to read and use on a tablet, and users with larger displays see only a small amount of content. We also want the to keep the reading and editing experience consistent as users move from on wiki to another.

BUT, knowing that we will eventually need to switch all wikis over to Fluid Layout is one of the main reasons we are committed to user testing, and collecting user feedback early and doing a lot of testing before this goes live on all wikis. We've been gathering feedback on Fluid Layout and all Darwin changes from Wikia users on Community Council for 3 months prior to this announcement, and now we've enabled the change only on a few wikis in order to give all Wikia users a chance to test it and give us feedback before we think about enabling Fluid Layout everywhere.

As much as possible we want this to be a change that everyone can be on board with, and we genuinely want to know what you think about Fluid Layout. Are you seeing something you don't like about it now? If so, what would you change? How could this better work for your wiki? We want to know!