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.
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour 2. Example is "no thanks" in: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_2014-04-16_of_anonymous_e... 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:GuidedTour_usage
On 06/02/2014 08:16 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
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/
As Steven noted, you should not have to change your code using the old API immediately. However, we hope you will see a benefit to the new API, in flexibility, new features, and readability.
We are polishing the API and finishing final testing. The documentation for the upcoming API is available at http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/ (this URL is temporary), so if you think something could be clarified or tweaked, please let us know.
The basic idea of the new API is that you start by constructing a TourBuilder. From that, you construct StepBuilder objects by calling firstStep (for the entry point) (http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/#!/api/mw.guidedTour...) or step (http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/#!/api/mw.guidedTour...) for other steps.
Steps (http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/#!/api/mw.guidedTour...) can listen for events, which can then trigger a transition to another step, hide the tour, or end it. This is controlled by .transition() (http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/#!/api/mw.guidedTour...). .next() sets the next step, which can also be dynamic.
The details are covered by the API documentation; I just wanted to give a broad overview.
The old API is deprecated, and will not be maintained permanently (we will keep you updated on any plans to remove it).
Matt Flaschen
On 06/03/2014 03:29 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
We are polishing the API and finishing final testing. The documentation for the upcoming API is available at http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/ (this URL is temporary), so if you think something could be clarified or tweaked, please let us know.
This has been merged, so the API (for master) is updated at the normal spot, https://doc.wikimedia.org/GuidedTour/master/#!/api/mw.guidedTour . The preview at http://growthdoc.wmflabs.org/NonLinearGuidedTourPreview/ has been removed.
It will roll out to Wikimedia sites per the normal schedule (MediaWiki.org June 12, All Non-Wikipedia June 17, All Wikipedias June 19). Until it's on the wiki(s) you work on, keep using the old style of tours (defineTour) for any on-wiki tours.
Matt Flaschen
wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org