Forum:Disabling the layout builder

Forums: Index > Wiki DiscussionDisabling the layout builder

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Because it's pretty much breaking pages.

This isn't because I usually hate most Wikia features (well, I do, but not the point!), but it's almost impossible to edit the pages after their creation. I think this is like the RTE; while well-intended, it causes more troubles to fix them. In the case of the layout builder, we can't even fix the pages, we have to outright delete them.

I'm not sure what is causing the problem, but it doesn't like our templates. -D. (talk · contr) 18:15, April 9, 2011 (UTC)

It appears it is possible to edit the page (see Ring of Ruin), but I just cannot do it (perhaps this is on my end? I've tried on different browsers while logged out). The coding in the history page is available though, and it looks like that. --D. (talk · contr) 18:31, April 9, 2011 (UTC)

I brought this up about a year ago because I was concerned about how the templates were breaking some pages. The discussion then revolved around newer users having to manually enter the item entries. Some wiki users may not have the knowledge to edit anything past the WYSIWYG part of the code so the majority decided to keep it. It wasn't a consensus and I think that if you want to remove the templates then you have my support. But, let's leave it up here to see if anyone else has anything to say. -- tierrie talk contr 22:27, April 9, 2011 (UTC)

I'm with D. on this one. The confusion the template page causes is chasing away new users who will try to figure out how to input content anyways. If we remove the template page and instead put in something that links to the Manual of Style I think it will cut down on confusion. - Teonlight | DA Polls! 22:47, April 9, 2011 (UTC)

A WYSIWYG editor with some prebuilt components would be a nice idea. Problem is, that's not what you have with the current templates. I'm the one that created the Ring of Ruin page that D. mentioned, and at no point in either creating or attempting to edit the page (the first time around) did I see anything that looked like an editor for any part of the page at all other than the list of categories it was in. Go to that page and click to edit it; now take the resulting edit page, remove everything between the "Back to page" link at the top and the little bar of categories, and add a note off to the side that the "item or weapon" template had been used, and that's pretty much what I got no matter how I tried to edit it. No part of the template notice was more than informational, and there was nothing else to replace the main content edit textbox.

I got it to sort of half way work by changing the category list to code view and putting the content in there, but while that did get the information displayed it was not formatted correctly and would be automatically pruned out in any attempt to do another edit. I do not recall seeing any significantly different "enter initial page content" page in the creation process; there was a page for entering initial content, I think, but aside from replacing "edit" with "create" and the like in a number of places it was identical to the non-functional edit page. Douglasm (talk) 00:50, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

At the moment I'm all for disabling the layout builder. I actually tried to delete the layouts when I realised they weren't functioning as intended, but apparently that's not allowed. So it appears full disabling might be the best solution and we can maybe look at re-enabling them if they add some more functionality in the future. Loleil ^Talk 02:31, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

Unless I am wrong, the RTE must be enabled to make the layout builder works, but the wiki does not have it. I wasn't there when it got disabled here, but I'm pretty sure it's because there were a lot of formatting issues.

I don't know if it's even possible to make layout builder pages appear in normal wikicode after their creation, unless we delete the layout builder template for the page (but then, we'd have to do some fixing). Unless I am misinterpreting something, if we create pages with the layout builder, it would seem we would force users to use the layout builder and the RTE in order to edit them. --D. (talk · contr) 02:34, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. Well that makes disabling seem like an even better idea. Loleil ^Talk 02:51, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

Personally I am not a fan of this layout builder also, and after reading the above I also believe that disabling it is a good idea. Whether it's a new feature or not, no point of keeping it around if it makes problems. -- Snfonseka (Talk) 03:47, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

I wanted to see if I could delete the layout templates, and it seems to have worked. Not sure why it didn't work before for Loleil. I don't know if there are any deletion log.

So the layout builder is still enabled, but only if administrators makes them. I'm leaving this up just in case, but no one will be able to create pages with the layout builder since there's no template to use. --D. (talk · contr) 04:27, April 10, 2011 (UTC)

A note from Wikia / Preloaded Templates

Hi everyone! I'm the Wikia Community Team member who's helping with the end-of-CreatePlates transition. I know LayoutBuilder isn't the same functionality. For what it's worth, the upside of its rigidity is that it gives you full control over many pages at once (you can change a layout later and it will impact all pages that are using it). If that's not your cup of tea, however, I understand. And it's true -- it doesn't work quite as well when RTE is turned off.

A number of other wikis are using Preloaded Templates as an alternative solution. Check out how they're implemented at http://eq2.wikia.com and http://runescape.wikia.com for ideas, and read more about them at http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Preloaded_templates . Let me know if I can answer any other questions. --Dopp (help forum | blog) 18:27, April 11, 2011 (UTC)