Site Template Overhaul
I think a lot of people have already seen this by now, but I may as well put this up for public (staff) discussion:
http://scp-sigma-9.wikidot.com/ — Front page.
http://scp-sigma-9.wikidot.com/scp-1686 — Example SCP with rating module.
http://scp-sigma-9.wikidot.com/scp-682 — Example SCP with Heritage Collection rating module.
List of general changes:
- Massive visual overhaul with Much Shinies™.
- New background.
- Added logo. (Let's face it. As wishy-washy as we've been about having an official logo thus far, the greater fanbase and community have accepted it, so we have one whether we like it or not.)
- Custom-embedded title font.
- Customized search widget.
- Customized rating module.
- Adjusted margins to reduce dead space and increase content area width.
- Completely restructured and overhauled front page.
- Restructured side bar.
- Subheadings breaks apart "wall of text" feel of original sidebar.
- Custom bullets and restructuring to place more emphasis on tales.
- Links reordered to place more emphasis on making the site more accessible to newer members.
- Series order reversed to place more emphasis on newer series.
- Restructured top bar.
- Compacted layout slightly to reduce clutter.
- Moved out redundant "Content Archives" link from each series to dedicated main heading.
- Moved site theme into an external wiki page (seen here: http://scp-sigma-9.wikidot.com/component:theme).
- I was originally concerned about the performance hit from doing this, but after some initial testing, it turns out that Wikidot is far better about caching side-includes than full pages. This only adds about 20-30ms worth of overhead to the initial load, and caches properly for subsequent loads; the additional server stress is inconsequential.
- This allows the theme to be changed without hassling admins to copy and paste code into the site manager, and makes it easier to recover from oopsies.
- As an additional, satellite bonus: This will also make it trivial for international sites to adopt the same template.
Any and all feedback, comments, and/or death threats are welcome. I'm still tweaking some things here and there and experimenting with what else is possible, but this is ready to go and could be installed in under five minutes (as long as I have an admin to hand-hold through the initial installation, further updates won't require any admin intervention).
