Talk:Main Page test

There was talk a while ago of adding a random or featured article or image to the front page.
I've had a go with a random image and don't think it works all that well.
It's possible to select a list of images to use and give each one a different caption which can be linked to the page, but I can't work out how to link the image itself to the page, only to the main image file. See 17410 as an example (refresh until it comes round)
I think a manually selected "This week's/month's featured article" with the image linked to the article and a custom caption would work better.
Any thought on this?--Graham Phillips 110 (talk) 19:59, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I reckon this one's better. It just needs someone to update it every week with something topical. Main_Page_test_2--Graham Phillips 110 (talk) 20:51, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I notice the (first) random version seems very slow to load / refresh compared with the (second) manual version - it may be having to reload all the icons for the map of the line each time? I'd go for the second version myself. Should the featured article go below the line map(s), or even within the Categories of Article section? --Robin (talk) 16:24, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I'd also have a preference for a featured article, as we'd be able to draw attention to articles that need some attention - although there is the obvious overhead of someone actually having to update it! I wonder if it'd be easy to set up a more advanced page layout than that we currently have - see e.g. Festipedia (which is almost a carbon copy of Wikipedia's front page, actually). Looking at that, we could also have a featured image as well as an article - though now I'm just adding more things for us to do... --Danny252 (talk) 16:59, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I've made the changes on the main page. I changed the local settings to disable the cache to force the random image page to select an image at random, rather than just reload the same one from the cache, which is why it is so slow to load. Ultimately, I'd like to change to the same style as Festipedia and Wikipedia. I had a look at the source code though and there's a lot of templates and formatting there that I don't understand.--Graham Phillips 110 (talk) 19:42, 4 April 2016 (UTC)