Issue: Make the portal more interesting with more content discovery

Currently there is not really a wiki portal. There is a main article, an overview of the wiki areas, recent activity sideblock and the comments.
While this is nice and much better than what it was before it does not do what I need: show off vaultwiki as a platform and its content.
How do you show readers that your wiki is the place to come to? That it offers hundreds of interesting articles, in relevant categories?

The current portal lacks content discovery tools. News & science portals do have various nice ways to showcase content in a visually appealing way. Some of these methods can be applied to a wiki portal as well. (tabbed content blocks, carousel, ticker, interactive tiles, etc.)
Examples of science portals:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/

It would be useful to offer several ways to display categories and parent - child structure.
For example:
- forum type display (list each main category with subcategories under the parent)
- tile display (list categories as multiple rows of tiles or buttons)

Allow listing of articles in a category, but allow us to display specific things like for example: name, image thumb, synonym, genus, etc.
If a infobox function is implemented then it should be easy to pull all kinds of data from each article. The admin could then freely define whatever data needs to be displayed on such overview.

A tile display could also be used for such listing. For example: we have a biographies. It would be nice to show a tile with the picture of the person and the name on the tile. Hovering the tile could display more information (like for example infobox data or introduction text)
Here are some tile examples: http://tiles-gallery.com/#demo
http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/Origin...cts/index.html

Another thing that would be nice to display is the most popular wiki in the last X months. (based on views and/or wiki search)

A treeview category navigation would be very useful as well.

Show wiki articles in a NIVO slider. The beauty of a nivo slider is that its fully adjustable to how the admin wants it. Whatever effects, speed, size, its all adjustable. Such could show featured articles, popular wikis, etc.

What I also miss is some tools to entice the reader to become an editor. People will need to be directed to the information needed to learn editing. It should be easy to add something useful into the above functions.

Such things would make the portal much more interesting.