Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-2240397-20160211204935/@comment-24473195-20160211213545

I've converted a couple of infoboxes in w:c:p:Mentoring, and some I got from random wikis and added to w:c:p:Themes after spending some time looking for challenging infoboxes in top wikias to style or create. Based on experience with converting them it seems that although wikis and admins like to boast that  they have heavily customized their infoboxes it seems to rarely be the case. It comes down to a few things :


 * Borders - (rounded, square, custom corners, hidden, and shadow)
 * Navigation, headers, Title heading - (bg color, font color, size)
 * Background color -
 * Text (font, size, alignment)
 * group styling
 * n-th type styling
 * gradient stuff (rare only very experienced people use this)

In particular the biggest issue with styling is that it is incredibly hard to target specific elements and change only them. This is because infoboxes sometimes hide / show content randomly, and n-type doesn't work too well in those cases.

As long as you cater to those main use-cases, the rest of the designers can do their own thing using wikia.css if they want more.

Edit:

A good infobox:

Easy to read title. Groups and sections with clearly different colors or borders. It should also match somewhat with the theme of the wiki so it doesn't stand out like something that is external.

I think it may be a good idea to have some nifty preset themes, for example, metallic, aqua, wood. Or some based on locations (beach, space, sky, etc).

Side note: Are you planning to save the styles as meta-data or create something like MediaWiki:Infobox.css ???