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