Personally I would urge much focus. Creating a beta feature with a "fixed header element that allows someone to report an issue on their current page" seems like overkill. It solves a problem the beta feature discussions forums already solve and I'm already stretched thin in what I am being asked to do.

The only real reason to have a beta feature here is if we plan on enabling mediawiki ui form elements everywhere, which is what I thought we were working for. This would be a super simple beta feature to knock up as currently it is only turning on a global variable, the only hard bit creating an image for it to show up on the beta features preference page.

I worry that currently no one is looking at the website Matt setup, so I'd be keen to explore a way of getting this project more visibility and keep it moving whilst there is still momentum.

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yes, I agree completely, we need to do a lot of cleanup to what we have before any major public release, and we also need a logical place to corral things before a release that we can evaluate everything in tandem. We can discuss whether this is a beta feature or a test server. 



Jared Zimmerman  \\  Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation               


On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Steven, from the very beginning of Beta Features we acknowledged their would be Beta Features that were only for experimenting and exploring, that they wouldn't graduate. So this isn't a concern of mine. I think the only way we'll be able to get a good solid review of the controls, both internally and from users is to package it up as a beta feature and let people use the real production site with all the new controls in place. Matt's test instance is great but won't serve the same purpose.

Having a new feature we want to try and test but then decide not graduate is one thing. Nearby for Desktop was a good example of this. But releasing a beta feature we definitely never intend to graduate is just silly and a waste of resources. We want everything to look and feel consistent, hopefully with the nascent mediawiki.ui style as the standard. We mostly definitely do want to graduate new button and form styles to all core forms. It's actually one of the main complaints from the community early on in the process, that we were doing things in a piecemeal fashion. 

Before we push out a production beta feature, we still have work we can and should do to clean up button and form styles in mediawiki.ui, which we can use Labs for. For instance, the crappy typography in the buttons which is off-specification, the lack of appropriate padding for buttons, the messy state of the wikitext edit form with mw.ui controls, the inconsistent style of placeholders, and lots more. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager

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