Those arrows in the first image are I believe absolute-positioned editor creations, not anything that extensions create. (I'm not a fan of the relevant template.)

(I think this is still probably worth solving, just that you can't do anything about those ultimately.)

@Izno thanks! Yeh to clarify those icons are out of scope and am not planning to touch them. Just the ? icon. However in future those would be better done in a gadget using mw.util.addPortletLink. I don't think templates should be doing this sort of thing as it makes too many assumptions about how the page is built.

@Jdlrobson The engineers discussed this last week in estimation, a few questions were raised about the approach of making this a menu.

While I see the advantage of standardizing customization to this area of the UI, conceptually, it seems like this section of the UI is distinct from the list of links that usually comprise a menu. What's the intended design for multiple menu items in .vector-settings, and does that even make sense (i.e. what happens if a gadget appends several links to .vector-settings)?
This approach also might require a large amount of work, currently we use hardcoded template data and the Button.mustache template to render the limited toggle button. The Button.mustache template isnt currently supported by the menu architecture and templates. Looking at the Growth extensions help panel, it seems to be implemented with OOUI and involves dialog and button widgets that are both absolutely or fixed positioned, which could be difficult to convert into menu items.

Currently the limited width toggle button is just hidden in this case, is that an insufficient solution?

Currently the limited width toggle button is just hidden in this case, is that an insufficient solution?

The issue of the tooltip being off the side of the screen should be fixed in either case.

In future this area is likely to become reserved for client side settings in which case it will be a popup. This work is important to start collating features in this area.

The only requirement for a menu to work with addPortletLink is to provide a UL tag and an element ID so this shouldn't be a large amount of work. Anything else is out of scope.

By making code use addPortletLink we are also empowering future versions of Vector to have more opinions on how this should be styled and the ability to add constraints such as number of items in the menu.

Change 923526 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] Make bottom dock expansible via portlet links

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/923526

@bwang does the patch above help explain the goal of this ticket? This ticket would also involve updating the existing usages in GrowthExperiments etc..

Change 923526 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] Make bottom dock expansible via portlet links

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/923526