Site Conversion Progress (2019-03-01)
Context
I've been working in the new development environment so that my software development would not be disruptive. A good deal of progress has been made and I wanted to report it here.
Automatic Generation of Plaintext for Fact Sheets
I have made the automatic generation of plain text for Fact Sheets much less fragile. Conventions must still be followed for the text to be generated properly, the algorithm is no longer dependent on specific H3 heading names.
The Social Sharing Box
Check out the new Share box at the top of any page in the Main namespace—particularly pages that have plain text. I still have a little skinning to do, but I'm it's come a long way, is more user-friendly, and is much more reliable. It needs to be tested across a variety of hardware and software platforms, but so far it works with everything I've texted it on.
The social sharing box is what has taken the longest, partly because of all the workarounds I had to do to get "copy to clipboard" to work with iOS (because of that operating system's tighter security). I also had to do workarounds for Grammarly, which interjects itself into HTML text areas in the DOM. I did not want to disable Grammarly for the entire site, or require the user to do the same. I like using Grammarly when editing with the source editor. I have not tried Grammarly with the visual editor.
A New Top Template
A new template will take the place of the three templates you may have seen at the top of pages in the Main namespace. These have been replaced with
.
If you look at the source for
, you will see that it just contains ,
, and
. You can still use these templates separately in unusual circumstances.
Automatic Indents
Heading levels H3 and above now automatically indent, as well as the text that is under them. I believe this substantially improves readability. Currently, the indent for each level is set at 20 pixels, but it can be adjusted.
Less Templates Required
Because of the automatic indents, the
template, and smarter parsing, template usage has been tamed. You will find far fewer template in the pages now. I have edited every page in the Main namespace clean them up.
Expand/Collapse Buttons are to the Left Now
I thought it was annoying to have the collapse button jump to the far right when the user hit expand, so I floated the button left.
Standard Blueprints Determined
I will be creating blueprints (the word template is taken in wikiland) for our standard page types. I have already edited all the Main namespace pages to reflect that, except for adding the new Meta template near the bottom.
New Meta Template
I have created a new Meta Template which will feed the SEO meta tags, as well as the title, description, and image that is used when a user posts to Facebook or Twitter. The template is smart enough that you only have to enter title and description once, and it will use those as appropriate for SEO, Facebook, and Twitter. Also, a separate image for each page will not be necessary.
This will really improve sharing, as what the user will see in the Facebook and Twitter link box should always make sense because it does not depend on Facebook and Twitter's imperfect parsing to pull these values.
