User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-227331-20100830111849

There's some good things and bad things for this. first the good: 1) New module development. It needs this badly. As someone who tried to use the "page in widget" feature and failing, it can be frustrating to try and code something as simple as a Google calendar or a twitter feed into a widget. It's even more frustrating when you ask for help and it amounts to "idonno how it works, we've only had people ask about twice". So the possibility of someone doing that headache for me? Wonderful.

2) A cleaner feeling and a snazzy topbar. the home bar for logged-in users does seem a bit dated, and I like the new look.

3) Right column. Okay I'm actually neutral on this. A column is a column and as long as it's not a annoying horizontal menu then I'm fine with it.

4) Fixed width. I'm also neutral on this. Flexibility is the golden word when you're designing a website, but I'm honestly tired of messing with the code on my wiki to make my background images look semi-decent.

now the bad:

1) the social features. I don't want to know if timmy the thunderbrat uploaded a photo recently, I don't care that little suzie, bobby, frankie, suzufan1702, sasunaru4evr, lord dethman or l33ts7arz changed the article recently. I really don't. If I wanted that I would go to the history tab, wouldn't I? It creates unnecessary clutter that can be replaced by whatever widgets you want there instead. If a site owner really wants those features? make them widgets and let them make the choice.

2) Horizontal bars. If you have one horizontal bar it's fine, useful even. If you have a header and a footer it's ideal. If you have three horizontal bars at the top and a floating footer then that's bad web design 101. Nobody freaking likes floating footers. They get in the way, they obscure the info you want to know near the bottom of the page, and lastly, they ping that little nerve that everyone who grew up on computers has about popups.

2b) Having the navigation at the top CAN be useful... if it's about 6 items or less. considering that my navigation has eight items or more that means that they'll either get compressed and thus to small to read, or there'll be a scrollbar. And the one thing people hate more then extraneous horizontal bars is extraneous horizontal scrollbars.

There's a lot of good things here, and a lot of room for improvement here. I think as long as you make most (if not all) if the features opt-out, it will be good change.

But if I have to live with that godforsaken hover bar and the photo/community crap, I'll be pissed.