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Hi everyone,
As you've all probably noticed a change in Halopedia's appearance since your last logon here, these are part of the promised changes we announced back in our domain change proposal.
The new skin, "Halopedia" as it is called, will now be the new default one for the site. As some of you older-timers know, this skin was used by Halopedia back in 2008; when Wikia introduced it along with some social features which included Polls, Quizzes and Blogs. While we haven't been able to bring back any of those (as we also proposed to get rid of the 2 former), or the originally planned "Monaco" skin, we have re-introduced the Halopedia skin so as to give our independent site a unique look from most other wikis so we can attract more visitors. We admittedly found that Monaco was more of a trouble to install due to some missing code parts, so we decided to look at a close but easier alternative to give everyone a look that may be little different, but still feels familiar to them.
The skin at this moment in time of my writing, is still a bit bland and plain; as we have yet to fix up its interface to bring back the beautiful mountain theme and other graphic features that were present with Monaco that we had back on wikia. Please note that we are currently still working on this, so bear with us. Updates will be posted as soon as they are in.
We also understand that not everyone may take preference to this skin over the others that we have available. You can visit Special:Preferences → "Skin" to change your skin preference. As of this date, we offer "Halopedia" (our default), Monobook and Vector. For a bit more detail on this, Monobook is the previously default skin that most users were using until now, and Vector is Wikipedia's default skin. As it is, we plan to give Halopedia unique designs in each of these as time goes by. We apologize that this hasn't happened sooner, but as it is, maintenance and customization on each skin is not always a quick or simple process, are there is code that needs to be involved in the MediaWiki namespace, and finding that code is not always easy when you're unfamiliar with some of it, as each skin uses a different set of code for its customization.
Regards,
- File:Major.png Nìcmávr (Tálk) 16:58, 4 November 2010 (EDT)
Comments
Feel free to post your questions, suggestions or commnents below here
- Visually refreshing, I actually like the design — very nice and a bit more professional then the old stick a bunch of images in places that have no visual style or make a lot of sense. Durandal-217 17:44, 4 November 2010 (EDT)
- Although my favourite skin is still Wikia's Monaco, I love this one too. It is much better than the previous skins and reminds me old Halopedia. Nice choice. --Odysseas-Spartan53File:OS53Seal.png 03:47, 5 November 2010 (EDT)
- Love it, it's much more attractive now; Monobook gave me a depressed feeling, and Vector didn't have the Java stuff in the Navigation. However I think the "Quote of the Day" and all that should be improved - either shift the text to the left or make a design to fill the left side and make the formatting a little less bold. I also suggest that visited links should have a more distinguished colour from the unvisited links, particularly in the Main Page and the Did You Know's. Additionally, I can't find a place where I can access the Preferences page directly (as in, there is no link that goes to our Preferences page which used to be at the top right). Forgive me if any of these are in development. TuahA 04:15, 5 November 2010 (EDT)
- When you're logged in, there are six links in the navigation bar, below "Related Sites". On the right side, there are "Recent changes", "Preferences" and "Special pages". --Jack Phoenix 07:16, 5 November 2010 (EDT)
- Thanks for the info. Just another thing to add, I think the Did You Know on the left should be omitted from the Main Page, as there already is a Did You Know on the right. TuahA 10:47, 5 November 2010 (EDT)
- I'm not really sure about committing it from the Main Page because that removes the feature entirely for those using Vector or Monobook as their skin choice. Both of the DYK's also spawn random and different facts each time, so there's no duplicates apart from the feature itself. - File:Major.png Nìcmávr (Tálk) 14:23, 5 November 2010 (EDT)
- Thanks for the info. Just another thing to add, I think the Did You Know on the left should be omitted from the Main Page, as there already is a Did You Know on the right. TuahA 10:47, 5 November 2010 (EDT)