Blog:Some new planned features

Note: Please leave comments on the proposed features, your feedback is appreciated.

Featured Articles

I've been working on implementing new features and improving old ones, and one of the features about ready for deployment is "Featured Articles"

If you've ever seen Wikipedia's front page, they will have a "featured article" blurb for an article they thought was so good, they want people to know they thought it was above and beyond the usual quality of all their articles, and it will rotate out to show other articles each time you visit.

I will be able to give this place that functionality soon.

See here for detailed information on how it works.

Also, since I'm a newbie and I'm sure some veterans know several articles that could use this sort of endorsement, please feel free to add link nominations to the Featured Article page.

For technical reasons, we can only add a few dozen before the site has issues updating the FA links, so please don't nominate several hundred articles, the template can only handle 30 or so before we run into issues.

Also, since I copied and modified the page from what All The Tropes uses for deciding what articles count, I invite other admins here to work on the guidelines for what a featured article's qualifications are, that I left blank so others with more experience can fill in the blanks on.

UPDATE: Added Metal Gear Survive as a starter FA, would like the other admins to look over the FA page and decide on rules for adding candidates for FA status before I add more.

Chatting

As I'm well aware, this site has a Discord channel, but that is not the only means of chatting about the site. One can also chat via on-site chat client or an embedded Freenode instance.

If anyone would prefer, I can request one, the other, or both be added by Miraheze.

I can also add links to the Discord (someone please fill me in on that) to the sidebar, and I'll be looking into means to make it integrate into the wiki here like it could be done on Wikia.

'''UPDATE: Discord is integrated on the front page. Do not expect it will not work on the mobile skin of this site, this is normal, this was the same as how it worked on Wikia.'''

Community Center/Help Pages

Most wikis have a community page or something similar where they can basically view a "bulletin board" of common tasks and things that need done, like pages missing images, pages with no categories, or other tasks that need worked on, as well as useful site information for editing.

UPDATE: Wikia left a basic template for this page when you guys imported your dump from there, so I gave it some cleanup and added a link to the sidebar, the Community Portal

Also,since MediaWiki can be difficult to edit at times, I was considering adding links to common resources for confused editors to the sidebar or links to a common help page where they can be found.

'''UPDATE: Since there is an issue porting over XML copies of pages from other wikis without getting some permissions changes I can't do on my end, I have replaced the help link on the sidebar with one linking to All The Tropes' Help Pages, which I have curated to be as easy to understand for new users there and will be just as helpful here. You should likely open that link in a new tab so you don't confuse ATT for here.'''

Page Creator

To make page creation a LOT easier, I have added a page creation form on the "Easy Page Creator" link on the sidebar. Just type in the name of your proposed article in the box and a page with a basic article format will be created for you, which you can then edit with content and save.

On-site chatting

For those unable or unwilling to use Discord, or who simply want to chat with other users on the site without using external services We now have an on-site chat room, and you can open this in a new tab while editing on another.

All logged in users may access it, and all admins may moderate chat and remove disruptive users. There is a history of all discussion accessible for the chat as well. If you have given yourself a user avatar, Chat will use that for you.

