Hi all,
This is just a heads up that there are some design changes to the
look-and-feel of guided tours,[1] as well as some backend changes relevant
to people who've written their own tours.
Design aspects that are changing, in no particular order...
- Animations! Guiders that point at something will now animate using
CSS. We really hope this will make guiders more pleasurable and easy to
use. Tour authors will be able to turn this off if they want, and it will
not animate if the guider is not above the fold already.
- Button styles: we removed deprecated button classes and now use the
mw.ui "progressive" class by default. We also added styles for a
"quiet"
button.[2]
- The pokey, i.e. the triangle shape which points at stuff: this is now
made in HTML/CSS instead of using images, and is smaller.
- Border styles and shadows: we're making these less bold. Now that
guiders animate they should stand out more, so heavy shadows/borders are
less necessary.
GuidedTour's backend has also undergone a major refactor, which is close to
being merged. This is described in full at the commit, which is just
waiting on us to update logging:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/116228/
The TL;DR is that you will not have to rewrite your tours for
compatibility. However, for new tours, we now support non-linear
progressions and other features. This means that we can do things like wait
to trigger tour steps based on user actions (like asking to Save after a
user types in VisualEditor).
As far as I know,[3] the following wikis have local guided tours which
could be updated:
- Commons
- English Wikipedia
- Farsi Wikipedia
- German Wikipedia
- Portuguese Wikipedia
- Wikidata
I'm going to reach out to some tour writers personally to make sure they
know about this, but any help you can provide would be good.
1.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour
2. Example is "no thanks" in:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_2014-04-16_of_anonymous_…
3.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:GuidedTour_usage
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
