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.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
