Hey DJ,

Thanks for the feedback! Responses in-line.

On 21 May 2016 at 04:52, Derk-Jan Hartman <d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com> wrote:

I like the addition of the descriptive subtitles. But I would suggest taking them to meta to settle on what they should be exactly, and also then documenting them (including arguments) to make sure that they can be used consistently throughout the projects.

I agree that some standardisation of the phrases used here would be useful. I'll pass that feedback on to Communications, who I believe handles most of these kinds of situations. In the mean time, I think Discovery can take a quick pass on the phrases that are being used on the portal to make them a bit more consistent.

I was wondering about the colors. Have we considered the MediaWiki/OOjs UI color theme already. In my opinion the portal feels more cologneblue than Vector right now..

I can see what you mean. A lot of the styles of the new elements have been made to fit the old style of the page. I'm not a designer, so I don't know specifically what to recommend to the team here, but I think they can keep this in mind for the future.

Also, I do wonder a bit about the consistency of the portals and the lack of options for reuse of these improvements by other portals, and I personally think it would be great to start expanding parts of the development to other portals now.
I think it would be wonderful if we could create a pipeline of reusable elements among the portals, that allows for some consistency, but trying to avoid blandness and uniformity. Simple things like a library of Less variables usable by all portal pages can mean a lot for these kinds of efforts and I'd love to see some attention devoted to that, so that other portal pages can benefit.

As explained in T110070#1653320, Discovery is not actively maintaining the other portals. That said, I agree that trying to get our code to a state where it's easily re-useable for other portals so that interested people can migrate it over to the other portals would be good to do. I filed T136151 to track that work.

For community participation, I also have some ideas:
1: There is no README.md

Good point. I saw you filed T135902 and T135903 for this. Thanks! The licensing question is somewhat complicated given the history of the portals; we will need to consult with Legal on this to make sure we get it right.

2: Make sure that it's easy to test the master version.

The great thing about github for instance is that you can do tricks like:
https://cdn.rawgit.com/wikimedia/portals/master/prod/wikipedia.org/index.html
That's powerful to be able to preview straight from a git repo. If you have links like that to the readme/meta page.

I'll pass this feedback on to the engineers working on the project.

3: Update https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project_portals <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project_portals>

I wasn't aware of this page. I'll pass it on to Chris Koerner, Discovery's community liaison, so he can look at updating it.

Thanks!

Dan

Dan Garry

Lead Product Manager, Discovery

Wikimedia Foundation