Even-faster-Monaco

Sannse March 12, 2010

Over the last few weeks we have been working on improving the speed of the site. A major part of this is improvements to Wikia's current Monaco skin.

The new version will use 'sprites' (combined images) or CSS to replace some individual images. This will cut down the number of images your browser needs to load and make pages faster. There are also changes to the ways Javascript and CSS are processed for the skin, with some stylesheets being combined to further speed up loading.

So, what should you see on your wikis? For most, the only change should be faster loading times. For a few wikis with heavily customized skins, you may find that some icons are reset to the defaults. Examples of this are the external link icon and the "more" button in the header.

We expect the changes to be live around March 18. If you want to test the changes in advance, you can do this by going to Special:DevCookie and set the cookie to true. Then, when you go to any wiki, you will see the newer, faster Monaco.

The main places you will see changes (and to check) are:

The search field and button.
The two header buttons (like the "more..." button). These were previously images and are now rendered with CSS. The CSS class "color1" is applied to these buttons by default, but the buttons can be different from color1 by specifying a background-color and color for the CSS class "header-button".
The green and gray Wikia buttons. Again, these are now purely CSS. There is a tool to help style buttons at: http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:ButtonFactory

When you have finished testing, don't forget to go back to Special:DevCookie on any wiki and remove it.

This is an important improvement to the Monaco skin, and we look forward to faster site speeds. As always, feel free to contact us through Special:contact or here if you need any help.

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Retrieved from "http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sannse/Even-faster-Monaco"

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W00t looks awesome

May 22, 2010 by Manyman
Metargo: I've asked Uberfuzzy to come over and have a look at what's going on there. I'm not sure if it's related, but he should be able to work that out

March 25, 2010 by Sannse
The Monaco.css file on the wiki http://it.wow.wikia.com has stopped working... Else if there's a custom skin it displays only the sapphire one

March 25, 2010 by Metargon
history
This is a change that may cause a bit of short-term pain, but will cause obvious benefits once any bugs are ironed out. Loading images always drains resources more. I guess patience - and reporting any bugs - is best at this stage. :)

March 20, 2010 by The 888th Avatar
I can't feel the speed increase at all. And now I'm missing the edit buttons I SO desperately need in Wikianswers. There are also other issues I'm not mentioning, but these updates are honestly beginning to give me a terrible migraine. As you can see, the other admins in WikiRespuestas are beginning to get somewhat tense about it too.
More information here...

March 20, 2010 by Molokaicreeper
history
@Kirkburn: Global.js is back on line now. Thanks for checking back.

March 19, 2010 by Greyman
@BladeBronson - how do I do that? I don't see a place in the .CSS for it.

March 19, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
I ran into two problems starting either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. The first is that pages on the Phineas and Ferb Wiki would get almost all the way done display the page, but sat there waiting to load the last "element" of the page. The second is that when this happened, it would not respond to any links I clicked on. However, as soon as I clicked on the Stop button, it would go to the link I asked for.
This was happening with Opera 10.10, and only on that wiki. Other wikis like tardis and starwars were fine, and if I ran Internet Explorer or Firefox, the P&F Wiki behaved correctly. Clearing browser cache and a reboot didn't affect them. Both problems were fixed by upgrading Opera to v10.50.

March 19, 2010 by RRabbit42
Since yesterday we've some bugs in the homepage layout. It seems that the code for multicolumn tables no longer work, also poll width doesn't apply. May someone give us a little help? It happens both in chrome and FF.
On the other hands, I like very much your efforts to speedy wikia, and to improve it graphically, it is a very good work! Thanks!

March 18, 2010 by Gifh
@Gourleyo, that was something they explored, but some of the changes were impossible to dual support, as it defeated the whole point, in streamlining the skin, improving the backend caching, and saving everyone bandwidth.
Thats why some of the skin problems that were seen above happened, some of these could not be caught until it was in the full production environment and both the front (the skin) and the back (the new caches) were live at the same time.

March 18, 2010 by Uberfuzzy
Are people still seeing problems with caching? I think everything may have caught up now...

March 18, 2010 by Sannse
It would be nice if we had something called Monaco Classic to go back to the old version, but have another option in your preferences that says Monaco, which will be the new one.

March 18, 2010 by Gourleyo
I had trouble where on some pages like special ones, the writing sometimes goes over the bottom of the page, making it unreadable. Please fix this bug.

March 18, 2010 by Gourleyo
Greyman, can you confirm if global.js is still no longer working for you? It seems to be okay for myself (for example, my code from here, is working on here).

March 18, 2010 by Kirkburn
The white line that appears probably should be there. On light skins, there's a grey line next to the icon as well.
Looks like the answers wikis aren't doing so well at the moment. Now it's unreadable too. :P

March 18, 2010 by The 888th Avatar
history
~~The custom search icon no longer works, and CSS cannot fix it because the image is specified with an img tag instead of as a CSS property like background-image.~~ No, never mind that, it is background-image.
Also, the id has changed from search_button to search-button. Unless, of course, it was always like that, and my CSS has been wrong for over a year.

March 18, 2010 by The last username left
history
http://clubpenguin.wikia.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&curid=8017&diff=290493&oldid=281383 -- I'm not an admin, I have no control on their sitenotice or CSS.

March 18, 2010 by Joeyaa
history
@Joeyaa What was the problem? We may come across other wikis that are having the same problem. Also, the sitenotice is still up.
@Brandon Rhea You could upload a 16x16 icon and change the CSS for #search-button. The Star Wars Fanon homepage button problem is due to conflicting styles set in that wiki's MediaWiki:Common.css.

March 18, 2010 by BladeBronson
I may have missed this, but is there a way to have a custom search icon again?
Also, some buttons are hard to read. If you go here, for example, you'll see the "Create new article" button on the main page is impossible to read unless you put your cursor over it.

March 18, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
Club Penguin Wiki's problem has been fixed, it was a local CSS problem that had existed for a while but only noticed once the CSS was combined to one file.

March 18, 2010 by Joeyaa