For those new to the term, infoboxes are the tables that appear at the top right of each page outlining a summary of the page's information. It's been a few years now since the new style "portable" infoboxes were introduced, though on this Wiki we've lagged behind on updating.
At first this was because the original conversion tools were not particularly user friendly, and extensive support and documentation was yet to be developed. Over time, it became less of a priority to update these infoboxes as the original style worked fine. That being said, since Wikia moved to Fandom, the interface has slowly been updated to the point where the original infoboxes were becoming harder to maintain and looking more and more out of place.
The first infobox that was updated was the Lizzybox. This infobox is used to display information on a person. As a trial, I created the "Person" infobox and converted some of the more mainstream articles to use it. This was relatively straight forward as all the data tags could stay consistent.
Following on from this, I started to develop the "Album" infobox to replace and consolidate the following templates:
- Studio album
- Studio EP
- Studio compilation
- Mixtape
When redesigning the theme, it became apparent that the old style infobox had truly run its course. It wasn't compatible with dark mode, and if we wanted to change the colours of the infobox, each one would have to be manually updated. Because of this, yesterday and today I have finished the Album infobox and updated all of the pages that need it. As with the Lizzybox to Person conversion, the vast majority of data tags could stay the same. So that the four templates above could be consolidated, I have added a "type" data tag that can be used for the discography section of the infobox to highlight whether the reader is looking at EP discography or mixtape discography etc. The benefit of this is that it is easy to adapt to future formats.
"Infobox song" has also been updated. Unlike the previous old style infoboxes, it has been necessary for me to overwrite the original infobox with the new style. There are over 450 song articles on the wiki, and updating this manually would take far too long. The original code for the old infobox is still available should we need to go back to it. That beings said, "Infobox song" is now a duplicate of the "Song" infobox - either can be used.
I've gone through a number of pages on the wiki now to try to make sure everything looks as it should, but because of the scale of the changes I can't be sure. So if you see any errors or mistakes please let me know and I can try to fix them. I'm aware there are a bunch of people pages that need to be updated so if you're feeling brave, go to edit source and replace "{{Lizzybox" with "{{Person", otherwise I'll be updating as I go.
Feel free to discuss!