Forum:Changing infobox colors

On The Sims Wiki, we use a complex system of templates to control the appearance of infobox templates on the wiki. I am proposing that we abandon the current "generation-based" coloring scheme for templates on The Sims Wiki, in favor of either a "group-based" coloring scheme, or a universal coloring scheme. Let me explain what I mean:

Currently, The Sims Wiki's infobox templates display in different colors depending on the game "generation" that a particular subject appears in. This is most apparent on Sim pages, where the infobox on the right-hand side is colored red, dark blue, green, or light blue for Sims that appear in The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The Sims 4, respectively. This rule holds true as well for pages about game-specific objects, lots, and pages about the games themselves.
 * Generation-based coloring scheme

There are numerous downsides to using such a scheme. This list is by no means exhaustive
 * It's very complicated. We have several auxiliary templates in place to provide the right color information for each template based on the generation being used. This makes the coding for our infoboxes more complex than they otherwise would be, and makes it harder to update those templates as a result.
 * New generations = new colors. We encountered a problem when The Sims 4 was announced; our color scheme at the time only included TS, TS2, TS3, and a couple other groups, such as The Urbz. But now, we had to give a new color to The Sims 4 that was different enough from the other generational colors to avoid confusion. At the same time, it seemed important to make sure that the color we chose was relevant to the game, instead of just a random color chosen because it was dissimilar from all the rest. This decision took months to resolve itself, and in the meantime we were left with the default grey coloring scheme for TS4 infoboxes.
 * Defaults to grey. When a generation is not stated, when an infobox is used to cover material over multiple generations, when new content (such as a new game) hasn't been incorporated into the existing auxiliary templates, or (as mentioned above) when a new generation hasn't been assigned a color, all infoboxes related to that material display in grey colors instead of generation-specific colors. This is most readily apparent in Simbio-start, which always appears grey because it almost always displays information cross-generationally.
 * Not mobile friendly. Currently, our infoboxes do not display color when browsing the wiki on a mobile device. This is because CSS code (which our template coloring relies on) is not loaded by default for these templates. Wikia provides a way to create colored infoboxes on mobile devices, but to do so while also incorporating generational coloring is prohibitively difficult; this is one of the major reasons why our infoboxes still aren't mobile compatible.

One idea is to color templates based on their purpose, rather than on the generation of game they are being used for. This would require us to divide template usage into categories, then assign a color for each category. For example, we could mandate that all Sim infoboxes be green, all family infoboxes be blue, all object infoboxes be red, and so on. Coding colors for these templates would be much easier, since the game generation would no longer have to be taken into account at all, and we could control template color directly from the templates themselves rather than relying on auxiliary templates to define the colors to use. There are still a few downsides to this procedure: for one, we would have to limit the number of groups we create, or else we'd run out of colors that we could feasibly use. We would have to ensure that each infobox falls into a group, or else it would not receive its own color and would likely be forced to remain grey.
 * Group-based coloring scheme

Another idea is to eschew the whole idea of having different-colored infoboxes, and instead make all infoboxes the same color, regardless of generation or group. This has the advantage of being the simplest of all plans to implement, as we could define template color on a wiki-wide level without having to adjust multiple other templates to achieve the desired result. However, in so doing, we would lose the ability to differentiate templates by color, as they all would look the same.
 * Universal coloring scheme

Should we get rid of generation-based coloring for our infoboxes and, if so, what should we replace it with? Personally, I feel that generation-based coloring should be eliminated for all the reasons I've mentioned above. If we choose to eliminate it, however, I'm not sure whether group-based or universal coloring would be best. Additionally, if there is some way to keep generational-based coloring while eliminating some or all of the problems I've mentioned, I'd love to see that as well. --  LiR talk • blog  •  contribs 16:32, July 12, 2016 (UTC)