User talk:Funky Jah

Hello, Funky Jah, and welcome to the Official Guild Wars Wiki! If you need help with anything, please feel free to add a message to my talk page. I highly recommend that you check out the "Welcome to the wiki" page - it's extremely useful as an initial guide. Best of luck and happy editing! -- ab.er.rant 08:12, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Noticed your log saying you copied over your user page from GuildWiki. Just a little heads up to let you that the user page policy here is a bit different from GuildWiki. -- ab.er.rant 08:14, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, I read this page and updated my personal page immediatly to follow the rules as much as possible. -- Funky Jah (talk) 08:44, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Progession bar

Nice one! I think it might become popular on user pages if enough people see it. :-) --  (CoRrRan / talk) 21:39, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I've been wondering how I could make more people see this, would you have an idea? --Funky Jah (talk) 21:40, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, not directly no. I think the best thing, is to get yourself noticed by making good contributions and eventually people will copy it from your userpage. (If you're going to put it there.) Another thing you could do is get yourself into this category, although it is not directly the same. Perhaps a new category should be created for people having innovative ideas for userpage layouts... (dare we call it widgets? ;-) )--  (CoRrRan / talk) 21:45, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, thanks a lot for your advice. Unfortunately, I'm more of a freeky web developer geek than a content provider. Anyway, if I have another cool idea for a widget, I'll make it available to the community! --Funky Jah (talk) 22:07, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I saw your progress bar and thought "that'd be handy"! Would you mind if I ripped out it's guts and modified it for a little more flexibility in my own templates? I'm currently using it on my Character distribution table and it's working rather well. - Shotmonkey 22:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Well you can modify it, but I designed it to be ultra-flexible: you can change the color, the width, the padding, the margin and almost every aspect of the design of the bar just using the parameters of the template. Look at the template page, there is a list of all accepted parameters and their meaning. If you wish a new parameter to add extra customization, please tell me, I would be glad to enhance this template with new features! If you still want to modify this template, I have no problem with it, but please make your edits on your own copy of the template, so that mine remains unchanged. --Funky Jah (talk) 08:16, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Of course, I wouldn't edit your template directly :D I was intending to copy your template and modify it, but as it is indeed flexible, I can just wrap around it with my own template. See User:Shotmonkey/Sandbox for how i'm using it at the moment. - Shotmonkey 12:17, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I too came across your progress bar. Very useful! You might consider moving it the template namespace ;) but in the meantime, would you mind if adapted it here? -- ab.er.rant 02:01, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, what's done is done, isn't it? Anyway, I see no reason for refusing! ^^ Concerning the move of this template to the template namespace, I don't know how how to do it (well, I could learn if I wanted, but I'm too lazy). So you can wait until I find time to do it, but feel free to do it yourself, if you don't mind (and if you think it's necessary). This way, people could improve the template. I see one major way of improvement, which is adding support for background images for the bar, which I can't do myself because the only way to do it I found is to add a class in the main stylesheet (mediawiki doesn't support the url syntax in inlyne style declarations). --Funky Jah (talk) 10:51, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

It's up to you if you want to move or not :) If you want to move, you can just click on the "move" link at the top of a page and give it a new name. The old name will redirect to the new name so don't actually have to change any page that references the old name. As for improvements, I actually changed my copy to introduce a "min" and "max" so I don't have to calculate the percentage manually :P -- ab.er.rant 14:59, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

That's a very good improvement! I wonder why I didn't think about it myself... About the move, I'd like to find a real good name for this template before moving it to the template namespace. I'm not yet very familiar with some subtleties of the English language, so I can't figure out if the proper term is "progress bar" or "progression bar" (or anything else, as this kind of widget must already have a name). If you could help me by giving me the name you think would be appropriate for this template, I would appreciate. --Funky Jah (talk) 10:48, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

The name you have currently is fine, or you can call it "Progress bar" with the space in it, both are understandable. If you're interested, we have some guidelines on templates, but note that they are just guidelines and it's not necessary to follow them strictly. -- ab.er.rant 00:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I moved my template to Template:Progress bar, and I also cleaned up the description part using the formatting guidelines. Now what's left to do is to put it in the appropriate category, but I don't know which one fits best. Is it a display template, a utility template, a formatting template, or shall we create a new category for "widgets"? I'd also like to add your modifications to the template. As I already told you, your idea of min and max parameters is great and very helpful, so let's make this a perfect template by merging our ideas! Perhaps we should continue this discussion on the template discussion page. --Funky Jah (talk) 10:29, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

A "utility template" should be appropriate. "Display" is more about formatting or layout though, so probably not. I'll work in the changes when I get some more time. Do you want to replace the "progression" parameter entirely? Or maybe I'll merge them such that both works. -- ab.er.rant 12:17, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I was thinking about, making it so that both methods work looks like a better solution to me. First, there are already a few people using this template as it is now, so I don't want to force them rewriting their articles. Second, the simple progression/progression-text parameter system is perfect when it comes to displaying progression in the cartographer title for instance. So my idea was to add your parameters (and their behavior) so that any of both methods could work (perhaps making it so that if both methods are used, only the "default" one is taken into account). --Funky Jah (talk) 13:13, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I just thought about an improvement to your system, which would be to add a third parameter (I call it "current" but this name kinda sucks). Say you want to display a progress bar showing your progression in the KoaBD title track. You are rank 2 with 13 max titles. So the idea is to call the template with min=10, max=15 and current=13. The percentage would then be ((current - min) / (max - min)) * 100. I think this would simplify the creation of "title tracks" progress bars, because min and max can be directly taken from the title's article without the need of calculating anything (which is a great feature if the template is to be used by many users, some of whom are probably not good at maths). -- Funky Jah (talk) 13:37, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Alright I did it! Please let me know what you think about what I've done. I think it's rather flexible, yet perhaps not secure enough (I haven't tested it with "strange" values for min, max and current, but there are already some protections to prevent negative numbers to appear). -- Funky Jah (talk) 17:45, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Looks great! :D -- ab.er.rant 05:49, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

I still have a few ideas to further improve it, like a parameter to add a description in a tooltip and a "mode" parameter that allows one to switch between actual value display (the "current" parameter) and percentage display for the text on the bar and on the tooltip. I am also thinking about a way to allow one to switch the text in the tooltip and the text on the bar, or even better to make them totally independant. -- Funky Jah (talk) 10:40, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

I have also started using your progress bar in a a Title Tracking Template that I'm working on (as you know). I also took your advise and added the hover text over the progress bar to show what your next level is....just like the Progress bar in game. I've still got alot of code to work out, but if anyone would like to help me, I'd be very grateful. I think it's coming along nicely now with the addition of your Progress Bar Template into my idea. Jfarris964 18:35, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

OK, I'll give a look at your code and see what I can do to help. --Funky Jah (talk) 09:05, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Any help is appreciated and will get the project done faster. I've set up a little section on the "talk" page for people to sign up if they want to help out as well. I finished up a couple more of the titles yesterday, but there are still alot left to do. Jfarris964 21:59, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Excellent job on this Progression Bar. Just saw it for the first time and love it. I'll be using it shortly. Unindal 18:03, 11 September 2008 (UTC)