User blog:Random-storykeeper/Wikia HUDs: Header and galleries

Hello everyone,

In case you don't keep up with the latest Wikia news on Community Central, two new features are slowly making their way towards our wiki. One is the new Wikia header aka "Global Navigation", which is already active on a number of major wikis. Right now, beta testing is over, so the only place you will be able to check it out is at Community Central. It's a bit like the new DeviantART header imo, but a little on the tall side. Wikia is well aware that height is an issue amongst the wiki community. After making the changes, we can expect the global navigation to change completely, so a big heads up to that. You can read more about the new navigation header here.

Secondly, Wikia has been toying around with a new design for image galleries. By default, the first eight images will be displayed, with a show more button to expand and collapse the gallery. You get a part of the image caption displayed, with the rest visible on hover over. It seems the galleries will also crop images and make them square.

This look is also testable on our wiki by adding ?gallery=new to the URL of any page. It doesn't work very well with collapsible templates, so feel free to remove those temporarily or try it on a page with no collapsible template but with a gallery.

I anticipated the gallery wouldn't look as good with smaller images such as sprites (which we seem to use mostly for galleries), but after taking a look at [ Flying skulls], it actually doesn't look half bad. I'd say it works better for the smaller images than larger ones because there isn't much to crop, and saves the visitor a lot of trouble from having to load the lightbox to view the image in full.

I'm not sure if Wikia eventually will make this a mandatory global change. Currently we can make the galleries enabled by default and start early, or wait for Wikia to finally roll out this change. Personally I'm hoping the new galleries would be another optional look, since they will override slideshows and suppress videos as of the moment. Help:New Image Galleries goes into more details about the feature.

What are your thoughts on these upcoming changes? Sorry this came kind of late. I was going to write this earlier, but never got around to it until now.