We should remove "1/3, 2/3" and "1/2, 1/2" Dashboard layout options and go with just "Full" and "2/3, 1/3". These are universally difficult to understand anytime I see them in the wild and not good at presenting information.
For now I'm going to remove new Dashboards from choosing them, but leave code in to support legacy Dashboards... for now.
Why do you think installs (offhand: Babel, WMF) are picking 1/2 + 1/2 if they're strictly worse than 2/3 + 1/3?
The 1/2 + 1/2 on WMF seems fine to me?
The problem with 50/50 layouts is they don't guide the user anywhere as to what is important. It basically says, everything is important and conversely, is difficult to follow the page since panels just appear everywhere.
My rough thinking for new homepage is roughly consisting of three things:
And we'd provide a stock version of each that we think would cover 90% of users.
Do you think 50/50 and 33/66 are always bad even for standalone (not-on-homepage) dashboards? e.g., if we had a "Phacility Metrics" dashboard in the future after Facts, a 50/50 of a "Users" column and "Revenue" column or whatever could never be a useful way to present the information?
The other solution is just to make it so these are more hidden / advanced options. That the defaults we provide are good enough that users just modify those templates instead of making one from scratch.
haha
I definitely think we should skip the 3-column versions for now, I don't think we've seen any kind of need for them in practice. We could look at it again after Facts since I think some of these weirder things could make more sense on standalone dashboards, the app just isn't powerful enough yet for that to be paritcularly useful.
The header variants in T6444 might help give homepage dashboards more of a start point / sense of focus, although maybe they make it harder to do dock + content + sidebar.
We can definitely improve templating/defaults.
We could also make a "homepage" template which is specific and magical (15 + 50 + 35) or whatever if we need to, I think that's probably not too hard.
I think some sort of logged out / open source public template would head off like the majority of these. I think I had a plan in another thread.
When you're editing a homepage dashboard, just having a spacer bar there for the applications menu might help make it more clear that 66/33 is better in a lot of cases than 50/50 -- currently, you can't see what stuff will really look like until you're already done and installed.
Maybe I should just design out my dock idea, the dock then goes with Dashboards (admins can set the apps, etc).