User blog:RRabbit42/Getting ready for Rotten Tomatoes

About two weeks ago, Wikia announced a partnership with Rotten Tomatoes for their TV Zone section. RT collects and analyzies reviews of movies, and recently expanded that to include TV shows. Since The Simpsons is a scripted animated show, it is amongst the series included in RT's TV Zone.

The partnership means that the episode description on the Rotten Tomatoes page will be retrieved directly from this wiki. You can see an example of this for the pilot episode on RT's page for Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.

As you can see, only the text and pictures in the Plot section are included. There's certain keywords that RT scans for and they only use the last section on the page that matches they keyword. On this page, both "Synopsis" and "Plot" are keywords, but it retrieved the Plot section. This also means that for episodes where we have several sections describing the plot, not all of them are currently being retrieved. For example, if you look at "Treehouse of Horror XIX", you will see that the page on the RT website only displays the picture. It should have at least displayed the text from the Summary section but didn't, and didn't use anything else because those section headers don't match the keywords.

This means we have some work to do to update our pages so they will display better and more completely on Rotten Tomatoes. We will need to do things like making sure we use the same keyword for what we want displayed there and switching to just bold/enlarged text instead of a section header. We probably should move all the navigation to the top so that it will be out of the way of what's being retrieved. I have already started working on a replacement for the Tab template that will fix a different problem that showed up (the border being missing on the right side of the page). If it goes well, I might also be able to incorporate the Season template into the Tab template so that we can just use one template and it will show both the previous/next episode navigation and the full list of episodes per season.

Once I get the details ironed out of exactly how each page should look, I will post those so that we can have a consistent look on all of our episode pages.