User blog comment:Ducksoup/The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia/@comment-24473195-20150821205749

I see that there are a lot of curious and eager people aiming to use these Portable infoboxes (potBoxes). But this information/queries seems to be getting spread out all over. I've a couple of suggestions:


 * Create a new topic (Portable infoboxes) for the forum posts
 * Create a FAQ for it, linked to the Portable infobox help page
 * A how to guide could be created for those completely ignorant about css or xml, preferably hosted here, or in w:c:dev
 * Create a sample page (preferably admin protected) with before and after conversion, so people can see that the presentation looks the same
 * Possibly create a new forum for portable infobox or flags feature or possibly a new forum for MOBILE
 * Dogfooding - Lead by example, create a drive to convert all franken-boxes (old infoboxes) to potBoxes especially in wikias managed by staff (c,w:c:templates,w:c:dev.
 * A resource list of great looking infoboxes in the wild

Now for a few questions:


 * 1) Are there plans to open up the api for these infoboxes?
 * 2) If no.1 is true, any hints on what they'll be?
 * 3) Considering that this is a move for a better presentation layer. Are there any plans to create a better storage layer specifically for infoboxes?

There are more use-cases for an infobox api than one can imagine. For example, a simple bot/extension could automatically update details for a particular series infobox. One could cull information from sources like IMDB, wikidata and so forth.

More importantly improving/updating all infoboxes in case a new feature is eventually introduced either by wikia or an extension is a great use-case. Something that was essentially impossible in the good old franken-template days.

But ultimately without better storage options these potBoxes will quickly become cluttered.

It is interesting to note that the adoption seems to be steadily growing, as of this date, at least 240 wiki(a)s have adopted it according to wikiapiary. Apparently wikiapiary only tracks wikis with installed extensions not necessarily being used.