Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26635429-20151027212616

We’re reaching out to a few of our top communities, hoping to get you on board with the migration to the new Portable Infoboxes. And we have tools to help!

Simply put: Most current infobox structure translates very poorly to mobile experiences, and this is the case for any device that doesn’t use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, your Wikia page looks AMAZING. The problem is that Wikia’s traffic is currently trending towards mobile.

Mobile is the future. Not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic - it's mind boggling.

We have partnered with the Wikia community to create this new markup to make sure that your hard work can be displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) easily and without any new coding conventions. It’ll take some effort up front but we’re here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future.

Tools we’ve designed to ease the process

We’ve enabled two new features on your community. One is a tool for migrating the “old” infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your wikia that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the “Generate draft markup” button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup.

The second is a new feature on Special:Insights that will highlight which infoboxes on your wikia have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. It’s fairly intuitive - you can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the “Convert!” button on the right, which performs the same action as the “Generate draft markup” button.

This is our help page for the new markup. I’ll help get things rolling by converting a template or two as an example (if you’d like me to), as well as watching this forum post for any questions. 