Forum:New navbox

One ring to rule them all
I'm pretty much finished with the new navbox template, Navbox. This template replaces all of our existing navbox meta-templates like the old, , , , etc etc etc. You can do everything you could do with all the old templates (and more) with the new one. The usage changes are minimal (explained below).

You can see the template in action on the template page (which also has the full documentation), or in the template's sandbox. Feel free to play around with the sandbox if you like.

Help needed
I need some help to solve this little problem I've run into... Nah, just kidding :) All I need help with is testing, no worries.

If you want, there are two areas you can help out with:
 * 1) Testing whether the template displays properly in various browsers. So far, it works flawlessly with all browsers I have available. The browsers I used are listed below; if you have a different one or even just an older version of these, please let me know whether there are any issues or not.
 * Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10.5, Safari 4
 * 1) Playing around with the template in the sandbox and see whether you can get it to break.

All help would be appreciated. I'd rather find any issues before the template is used on thousands of pages.

New features

 * Ability to display images within the navbox, to the left and/or right of the content as well as to the left/right of individual blocks.
 * Navboxes can be nested; i.e. you can put one navbox into another, kind of like those Russian babushka dolls.
 * It's now possible to have some blocks collapsed while the others remain uncollapsed, or have some blocks with columns and some without - all within the same navbox. Basically you can mix and match whatever you like.
 * New style for better readability.
 * Fully stylable with CSS. Styles can be applied to the whole navbox, all cells of a certain type, all cells within a block or individual cells.

Usage changes

 * The  parameter has been renamed to  . People kept confusing this with the navbox title, so I've made it less ambiguous.
 * The various  parameters have been removed. Changing text-alignment can now be done with the new   parameters; see the template page for examples.
 * Parameters for displaying the images have been added; see the template page for details.
 * Parameters for changing various options globally or for certain blocks have been added. These allow for e.g. changing a block to column-style display, making it collapsible etc. Multiple options can be specified, separated by commas.
 * Parameters for nesting navboxes have been added; see the template page for details.

Coming up

 * Provided there are no major issues discovered, I'll rename the template to "Template:Navbox" and make all existing navboxes use it.
 * All navboxes will be renamed to include a "Navbox" prefix; e.g. "Megaton" will become "Navbox Megaton". For now, I will not fix up the template calls in articles; it should work fine with redirects. I'll have the bot fix the template calls in one go later on.

Feedback
As usual, any feedback is welcome :) -- Porter21 (talk) 19:30, June 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * Great work! No issues on my part (aside from the Enclave navbox generally needing to be trimmed down, but it's not related to the new templates). I'll play around with it in the sandbox. Ausir(talk) 08:25, June 12, 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Porter! I was a little bugged by the fact that Template:Navbox and Template:Navbox group had different features on them. Do you intend to change all of the existing, outdated templates, or have you? Ghouly89 (Talk) 12:58, June 12, 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, as I said above I'll update the existing navboxes once I'm reasonably sure there are no major issues with the new template. There's one last little thing I'd still like to improve, too. Changes to such widely-used templates cause thousands of pages having to be recached, and I'd rather only trigger that process once. -- Porter21 (talk) 13:40, June 12, 2010 (UTC)

Alright, if you have any issues (or found any issues) with the new template, now's your last chance to speak up. I'll start updating the existing navboxes in an hour or two.

As the last finishing touches, I have added a new "feature" and option to go with it. Unnumbered lists inside column cells are automatically formatted to look similar to e.g. ; the bullets are removed and level 2 lists (i.e.  ) are automatically made smaller. This behaviour can be turned off by using the "normallists" option in case you ever want to have a normal unnumbered list in a column row. Also been doing a couple of optimizations so the template is less heavy on the server & parser, primarily by drastically reducing the number of sub-template calls. As a result, the template now takes less time to save. Lastly, fixed up the column width calculations so the cells are visually centered. -- Porter21 (talk) 17:25, June 13, 2010 (UTC)


 * All existing navboxes have now been updated; it'll probably take quite a while until all pages using navboxes have been recached though. Let me know if you run into any issues. -- Porter21 (talk) 23:34, June 13, 2010 (UTC)
 * They look good, Porter. Nitty Tok. 23:36, June 13, 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks :) -- Porter21 (talk) 08:21, June 14, 2010 (UTC)