I'm looking for some advice and you all seem to be pretty enterprising.
Here's a little background... I am implementing MediaWiki as a catalog for business processes and work instructions. Because many of the tasks documented are computer-based, they include many screen shots of the relevant applications. For new users, these screenshots are often critical to helping them navigate. If we were only designing this for new users, we would include larger images inline with the instructions. For experienced users, these images can be a frustrating distraction as they try to skim through a process with which they are already familiar for only some details. The middle ground solution was to include the images as thumbnails on the right margin. New users can click to view the full sized image and experienced users can navigate through the process with minimal disruption by the images.
Here's the challenge... I have had some feedback that requiring the user to click on the thumbnail and view the full-size image on a separate page, outside the context of the task instruction, is not desirable. I agree it is less than ideal. I have a solution that I know I could implement if I was designing a web page, but am not sure how to implement this inside MediaWiki.
The image is reduced to thumbnail size on the page, but when the user does a mouseover, the image enlarges. An example of this, complete with the JavaScript, is located here: http://www.nsftools.com/tips/ImageResize.htm.
I was thinking that this might be doable with a template, but before I spend a lot of time monkeying around, I wanted to get your advice. * Do you know how to implement this, or something with a similar result, using a template or extension? * Is this something that would be overly difficult to implementing in MW?
I can't help but think that this functionality would be useful in other implementations of MW. Any ideas?
Thanks, Rick Sabatino