Template talk:GLAMportals

Feedback on the set of templates for GLAM portals

@GFontenelle (WMF) and @Susannaanas While I currently unfortunately don't have the time and brain space to help much with general GLAMwiki stuff, including the move to Meta, I have been using the GLAMportals-like templates for one of my work assignments, and I hope I can chime in at least a bit by giving some feedback on the wonderful templates you are building for us to re-use. I hope this is helpful.

• First of all, the simple and professional look of the templates is absolutely fantastic. I really like that they push you to be succinct, organize your information, and that they include images prominently! My feedback below is only meant to help improve with the limited time I have.
• You can see my attempts at grasping the templates here (including subpages) and here (my attempts at figuring out what the boxes do and don't do).
• I was wondering where to put this feedback. I also see that quite a few copies of the templates have already been made (?), with the ones for Wiki Loves Living Heritage as the originators (?). I can imagine more centralized efforts would be helpful so that we are all working from/on one clearly defined single set of core templates, and have a clear place to co-ordinate them. I was thinking in the direction of a Phabricator project (?) but I'm also aware that would pose a technical barrier for many. I'm not sure...
• Generally speaking: in their current form the templates are not yet super user-friendly and they could benefit from becoming more so. It would be great if any user (without knowledge of MediaWiki templating) could easily adapt them. At least, in my own projects and use cases, it's important that the wiki code can be "grasped" and edited by inexperienced people. I can imagine this would involve a round of template code streamlining, and also an update to documentation with a variety of examples. I am one of those non-template-builders myself :-)
• The header: I think the responsive banner image and the very simple design is fantastic. But I really struggled to get it to work and at some point gave up and returned to a generic "Portal navigation" template. I failed to make my header image responsive. I think it has something to do with creating another separate template? Ideally, to make the header user-friendly for as many Wikimedians and partners as possible, it would be great to have as few "layers" as possible and clear places and instructions where to insert the header image, menu items, etc.
  • I would have liked to use "superimposing text" like is done for the GLAM calls. But I have the impression that option is only available for event situations. I also would just like to do superimposing text just for the title / name of a portal, even if it's not event-related.
• The boxes: I absolutely love them! It took me a while to figure out the options, and how they play out, and it's still a trial and error process for me. You can see my attempt at trying various options here.
  • It looks like some options/parameters are not very compatible and it takes testing and guessing which ones will work. I can imagine this can use optimization, both in code and in documentation.
  • In general the template documentation would benefit from additions, examples...
  • Some of the template options have confusing names - there is color, style, and under color there are the bluebox whitebox smallbox blank image options - "small" is not a color :-)
  • It took me some time to see and experiment with the behavior of the various sizes and I still don't fully understand what they do. I have the impression that e.g. "third" sometimes also becomes wider (I haven't tested this very thoroughly). It also took me a while to see/understand that "quarter" doesn't necessarily make 4 boxes appear in one row together.

I hope this is useful. Thanks for your work on this! SFauconnier (talk) 10:43, 25 February 2025 (UTC)