The Sims Wiki talk:Development Portal

This area is for minor notifications about the administration, maintenance and development of The Sims Wiki. It is primarily adressed to those who actively participate in these areas, but anyone is welcome. This page was created in an effort to have people communicate more about what they're up to, their current areas of interest and what's new regarding development of the wiki.

The main place to discuss things about this wiki is still the Community Portal talk page. This page is more for notifications, which might not neccesarily need a discussion, though feedback is always nice.

Examples of things to post here include:
 * What can I post here?
 * Minor templates you've made, which aren't big enough to warrent a blog post on the front page.
 * Things you've noticed which might require an administrative hand at some point, but isn't urgent and doesn't conflict with any policies.
 * A heads-up on common mistakes made while developing templates or other maintenance tasks.

Please do not archive posts too quickly, people must have a chance to see them and reply. Once something IS archived they can open up the discussion again of course, if it's really needed, by linking to the original discussion.

The Development Portal
The discussion for the place itself should go here. This is the result of a conversation between Duskey & a morris: User talk:a morris, a few posts down.

Timer / Countdown template
I took the told timer template and stripped it down to just the countdown and made a countdown template. Now you can use it in-line or create your own box to put it in. 'Countdown' is currently placed in the Test templates category since I'm not sure about any kinks yet. LostInRiverview has made an effort to find out which time zone abbreviations it can handle on his talk page (archived and moved to Template talk:Countdown). Duskey ( talk ) 13:35, July 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * As far as I can gather, only timezone abbreviations used in the main United States (or adjacent areas of North America), as well as UTC, apply. These zones are Pacific Standard/Daylight Time (PST/PDT), Mountain Standard/Daylight Time (MST/MDT), Central Standard/Daylight Time (CST/CDT), Eastern Standard/Daylight Time (EST/EDT), and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The difference between Standard time and Daylight time depends on the time of year, and whether a certain locality practices Daylight Saving/Summer Time. For this, and a couple other reasons, I would advocate that the countdown clock be used with (UTC) in most, if not all, circumstances. -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog)(random page) 15:53, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

I'm thinking we can use this for countdowns to release dates or other large events. Maybe even for when a block expires on blocked user pages, but I think it would require changing the javascript since I bet many people will disregard the 'T plus' after it has expired and still see a countdown. Although we could just instruct them to remove it themselves when they can, sort of like warnings. Duskey ( talk ) 13:35, July 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * It's too bad you can't set the countdown to automatically stop counting once it reaches the assigned time... maybe have it say "Time's up!" or something. If that were possible, we would need a template for countups as well, though I can't think of where that would be useful. -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog)(random page) 21:23, July 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've been messing with the javascript and I think I made it work so that it stop counting when it expires and produces a text instead: Template talk:Countdown. Anyone who knows Javascript would probably kick me for the juryrig I made, but it seems to work. I'd like to ask people to test it out, see if we can find some bugs. If not, I'm open to suggestions to what the expiration message should be. It can become abit tricky:

Before: 'x days x minutes' till Christmas.

After: (as it is at the time of writing) Time has expired till Christmas.


 * If it's doable I wouldn't mind adding an (edit) text next to it so people can remove the countdown when it has expired. Duskey ( talk ) 16:14, July 20, 2010 (UTC)

Country userboxes
Some wikians have started making Country userboxes. I'm not quite ready to 'release them into the wild' yet. Many of them needs a hand from someone who knows about clashing colors. They also need to sort users properly in the 'Users/Ireland' category by adding ' | '. We also need to create abit more of them I think, so less experienced wikians won't have to face the daunting task of making their own. It's a shame we can't see where most of our visitors are from. When they're abit more ready we can create a blog post about them, announcing them on the front page. Duskey ( talk ) 13:35, July 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay we've got North America, Western- and Central Europe covered with userboxes now. Again since we can't see where our visitors are from this is just me guessing that come from these places. I'm gonna create a blog post, announcing these in a few days unless anyone has any major objections. LostInRiverview and I have been coloring the borders and text according to the actual hex colors on the flags and they are all sorting users properly. There's still time to make changes if anyone has some bright ideas or disagree with a color scheme, but refrain from editing them too much once they're announced on the front page. Duskey ( talk ) 15:03, July 20, 2010 (UTC)

Userbox sorting
At the moment, all userboxes sort users under U for User. This can be fixed by putting ' | ' in the template as I've done with Fan kaylynnts2. It won't register until users save their pages again I think. Now you know for future userboxes. Duskey ( talk ) 13:35, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

Unused files
The Special:UnusedFiles has been empty for a long time, since Copyright tags had a link to the file itself. Following a dicussion in the Message template standardization project I've deleted the 'self-link' and the 'unused files' page is now booming. I don't know how many there are, but the 'list 500' is available, so that should be fun. If you decide to do a few of them, don't just delete them. Check to see if we can use them on a page. Duskey ( talk ) 13:35, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

TOCleft template
I created tocleft for testing. You can see an example on my talk page. I think it works quite good on user talk pages. It's copied from Tocright though I'm not sure it needs all the code. Maybe someone knowledgeable can fill me in? Duskey ( talk ) 13:35, July 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * You should take a look at Wikipedia:Template:TOC left. --a_morris (talk) 22:36, July 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * Their documentation has some good arguments, I copied their template. No visible difference is apparent, but I'm sure theirs is fool proof and guarded against long titles and other stuff. Thanks for the link. I keep forgetting Wikipedia as a source for... everything. Duskey ( talk ) 14:50, July 20, 2010 (UTC)

Expanded news page
I added The Sims Wiki:News. I also made three links to it from the main page. (more news) and 2x 'More...' at the bottom of the 5-point news listings. I chose the SimPrograms RSS feed as a 4th since since they seem to have regular updates on just about anything Sims. I'm open to discussion about other news sites or removing it all together if it feels too much like the wiki is sponsering a specific site. Duskey ( talk ) 21:18, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

No official image
Added File:No official image.png to keep the fan creations from being uploaded to game titles without official box art. The placeholder obviously didn't do the trick. Duskey ( talk ) 19:35, July 21, 2010 (UTC)