Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3182821-20160703135433

With the new "community page" set-up, th character galleries are being highlighted as pages without links. A lot of them need further work as well.

So far I've been standardising them with the following headings:


 * UK Productions (sub-heading for the Video as it's visually a UK production but the most common point of reference for all fans)
 * US Productions
 * German Productions
 * Australian Productions
 * Other Productions

My thinking being, while productions such as Vienna were significant, we don't have many photos, and these four headings cover the biggest groups of productions. I've been trying to arrange the photos chronologically within each heading too, to show the development - this is particularly interesting for the German shows. Also, "Australian Productions" covers the Asia tours run by - is it Lunchbox Productions? The same production and set, costumes, etc, working out of Australia.

We can always expand out of the blanket "Other Productions", if, say, there's more than a dozen images from one specific production, perhaps if a lot of Japanese Cats images are added.

What I'd like feedback and consensus on, is a couple of possibilities -

1) a header photo, like the profile image on the character page, that functions as the thumbnail for the page.  It seems to default to the first photo in the first gallery, which at the moment means it'll be an original London Cast image.  While the OLC were amazing their costumes aren't necessarily representative of the overall character's look!

2) Designs, vs illustrations, vs Fan art.  I think Munkustrap's gallery has the designs and illustrations at the top, and I think Jemima's gallery has fan art at the bottom?   There's lovely illustrations from the German and Japanese productions, should they be a separate "non photograpic" gallery, or should they be in with the photos from their respective productions?

3) Fan art.  We don't have much art on here, there's some lovely work out there.  Should we look to archive more art here?  Or do we want to discourage fan art on the character pages, keep it to personal blogs?  It seems like something we should have a policy on.

4) Links.  The Wiki software doesn't like pages not having links...  so far I've been linking in actors in captions where known.  But would it be better to link the productions? Maybe in a list, for example:

German Productions

 * Hamburg 1986
 * Stuttgart 2001
 * Berlin 2002
 * Düsseldorf 2004
 * German Tour 2005
 * German Tent Tour 2010-2013

But would that be a bit much of a block of somewhat irrelevant text at the top of each gallery? What would be most user friendly, a list like this, or links in the captions of each photo? This kind of list would be much more editor-friendly, copy and paste each time!

(OK, let's see if the forum is any more stable now than it was a few months ago... see if it'll reliably show posts and replies!) 