Forum:Modular userboxes

For those who aren't familiar, Userboxes are the small boxes that are used to decorate the userpage with a long list of miscellaneous stuff. They're attractive and colorful, and there are so many selections of userboxes to fill in the userpage.

Until now, I've never been a fan of several userboxes, such as userboxes for [The_Sims_Wiki:Userboxes/traits?oldid=547641 traits], favorite food, favorite music, and some miscellaneous userboxes. A trait userbox is made for every single trait that's in The Sims 3. The number of trait counts up to 99 in total, not including hidden and removed traits. This is an excessive number of templates we have made. And even though favorites don't have as many selections as traits, the case is just the same, with fewer numbers.

The point is not the excessive templates we have here, although personally, I feel inconvenient seeing that many similar templates for the same purpose. The problem is, every single userbox is a separate template. Even though userboxes like user schmoozer and user lucky practically have almost identical contents, they count as different templates. This makes the maintenance of the templates very difficult. It might still be maintainable for favorite music userboxes, but with that large number of trait userboxes, it's very inconvenient. That's why the large number of templates still matters.

There's no modularity in such userbox system, which is why I'd like to introduce better, modular templates to replace the older system. For instance,  and   have similar contents but with different icons, names, and border colors. I've created a modular template to change it, so  and   would produce the same result. See the difference? In the second instance, it uses the same source, but different input in the parameter produces different result. This makes it possible to add more selections for later purposes, and since it's in one template, changing the template will change all instances, thus making the maintenance easier.

I've taken a step forward for User food and User trait as well, and although it seems to lose its points since Into the Future is the last EP, this modular template system can still be used for other purposes. For example, there are many miscellaneous personal userboxes, and some of them are designed distinctly. However, this doesn't mean that some userboxes still have similar contents, which is why I'd created Misc template even earlier.

I don't intend to replace any existing usage of the userboxes. There are far too many usages to replace one by one, and I'm not sure if we could rely on bots, but at least, we could stop using the old userboxes and start using the modular ones. I want to know what anyone else thinks about this.

Honestly, this idea has been implemented for quite a while, but I've never publicly announced it nor discussed about it, so it's my fault to have taken action without anyone's knowledge. Hence the reason I started this discussion.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  12:50, November 18, 2013 (UTC)