The new Portable Infobox syntax
Wikia seem to be trying to phase their new Portable Infobox syntax in. And it certainly (for simple cases like Template:Charbox) makes it much easier to maintain infobox templates, now we have dedicated markup rather than a tangled mess of template transclusions trying to avoid missing or extraneous newlines to avoid breaking the table syntax.
Accordingly, I have phased the new syntax into the infoboxes on this site, with varying degrees of kludgery.
The syntax is in many ways beautiful (look at the current source code of compared to what it looked like before today and you'll see what I mean).
However, the actual styling of the infoboxes is, in my opinion, inferior to what was there before. Hence I've ', partially derived from the now-obs…
Extraneous newlines in infoboxes
I have finally solved the problem of extraneous newlines in infoboxes.
The problem was that Parser Functions strips the leading and trailing whitespace from both "then" and "else" clauses. So newlines were either absent (breaking syntax) or nonconditional (sometimes accumulating to paragraph breaks)
The way around it, as I looked up on Wikimedia MetaWiki, simplifies to: create two additional templates, select the template name using the Parser Functions conditional, and then wrap that conditional in a transclusion (as opposed to vice versa).
Hence, presenting Template:Newline which uses this method. The backends and Charbox, Infobox, Comics and Comics2 have been edited.
Logo proposal and infobox templates
I have been working on improving the logos, and produced these:
(wide image for Wikia skin and Wikiamobile)
(square image for Monobook)
I'm proposing that the current logos (or at least the Wikia skin one) be replaced with these ones.
Proposal thread.
In other news, I have been working on improving the transcript infobox to be more in line with the new-style Template:EGS-link in what data it takes. In particular, the current version doesn't take into consideration the archival ID (which in many cases is not the same as the comic number: IDs jump around or are skipped in places for various reasons). The adoption of EGS-link has also made "(section) comic for YYYY-MM-DD" the standard way of referring to a comic. The result is Template:Comics…