Gadgets are little tools supposed to improve various aspects of the wiki like editability, accessibility, look & feel, etc. After a testing period a couple of Gadgets will be enabled by default depending on various conditions fx, whether you are logged in, have specific rights, etc. Other gadgets might be added to the wiki but not enabled by default. The trick with Gadgets is that users can disable default gadgets or enable optional Gadgets in their user preferences, fx heavy editors might be interested in specifc gadgets to make their editor's life a little more convenient. If you see something that could be a Gadget on other Mediawiki wiki's and you want to have for EP wiki please let us know.
Introducing the first Gadget: UTC Live Clock UTC Live Clock displays a clock in the upper right corner of the wiki showing the current Universal Coordinated Time which happens to match EU time and therefore could be interesting. Moreover the UTC Live Clock features a "purge cache" functionality. Meaning when you click it the cache of the current page is deleted and the latest version in the database is displayed. With wiki featuring more and more structured data and automatically generated content this comes in handy. Pages are usually cached to increase performance. When you edit something supposed to be shown in an automatically genereated table for example you might not immediately see the changes due to a chached version of the page being displayed. In that case clicking the UTC Live Clock would ensure you see the latest version of the page. The UTC Live Clock is currently enabled by default for logged in users only (since only logged in users could use the purge cache feature anyway). If you don't want to have the clock displayed you can disable it by unchecking the according checkbox in the Gadgets tab of your preferences. Enjoy!
I don't think there will ever come a time when I can't say enough about all the work that you do here to make it more efficient and convenient for the users, so thank you yet again for caring as much as you do about our forum experiences, it's really appreciated Tass.
In this case I didn't do much. It was mostly copy & paste. The good thing with EP wiki is that it literally has 100s of developers. And because simple Gadgets are that easy I just enabled another one by default. lefteditlinks lefteditlinks moves the section edit links from their default position at the right border of the page to a imo better place just next to the section headline. lefteditlinks in now enabled by default. You can disable it by unchecking the according checkbox in the "Gadgets" tab in "My preferences". Maybe pictures say it better than words:
Another Gadget named HotCat has been enabled for everyone by default. Wiki pages should be categorized, meaning they should be members of one or more Categories. For example by putting images in Category:Planet Cyrene you can ensure that they appear in the Cyrene Gallery. The categories a page does belong to appear at the bottom of the page as links. With the wiki further evolving categorizing will be come more and more important since they can be used in queries automatically listing a selection of items, missions, images, etc. Usually pages are added to categories by adding a tag like [[Category:NameOfCategory]] somewhere on the page in regular edit mode. HotCat makes categorizing a lot easier. It adds an interface with edit icons, buttons and drop-down fields for managing categories. This interface is integrated in the bar showing the categories at the bottom of the page. Go have a look! An section with a lot more detailed info about HotCat has been added to the Help page for categories: Help:HotCat.
Replaced Lefteditlinks (post #4) with "modify-section-style" to get rid of interference with another gadget called "edittop" which adds a section edit link for the top section next to the article headline. Which means we one more gadget enabled by default now. To disable both gadgets browse to "My preferences" -> "Gadgets". More gadgets to come soon.
