Hi all,
Maybe I am running with this, but it would benefit the community to make
these efforts generally reusable.
I understand SMW is no longer trying to fit into the Wikimedia universe,
but it still honours the MW approach of edits and source being human
parseable and benefits from ongoing MW enhancements. And using the same
skin as Wikipedia immediately lets people know they are on a (real) wiki
and certain important functionality will be present. Though generally most
people don't know or care, some core editors may; one one project I
switched to a decent menu based skin and had to switch back due to outcry.
For me I want to help people craft knowledge and having the facilities up
front is helpful.
On the other hand, MW's skin is pretty uninspiring. But moving away from it
means you lose access to the usability initiative and other enhancements
that use core MW components. It would be a substantial disadvantage for SMW
sites to not be able to easily use these enhancements, and make them harder
to maintain.
One mitigation could be to lightly adapt the mobile skin. This would solve
multiple problems in having a less clunky appearance yet also helping SMW
support mobile users.
I realize it's political but if there is an objective for the WM
organization to work with related efforts, maybe some MW designers could
collaborate on this project.
As well as fitting into a progression plan with VisualEditor and WikiData,
which I know many people are interested in (access control being the other
point where SMW can't really compare to peer efforts).
Finally, for the sake of efficiency and consistency it would also be good
to have the skin share appearance and functionality with the SMW extensions
such as semantic forms. And I am among many people who are extending SMW
using Javascript and we'd like to be able to connect with existing
components as much as possible.
If there is an effort to raise funds for this my company could contribute
some.
Thanks!
David
On 20 October 2014 04:02, Markus Krötzsch <mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org>
wrote:
> On 20.10.2014 09:05, Krabina Bernhard wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > regardless of the skin used, I think it's worthwile to have a look at
> some sites we should aim to match regarding their appearance, e. g.
> >
> > http://www.drupal.org/
> > https://wordpress.org/
> > http://www.joomla.org/
> > https://www.atlassian.com/
>
> You are right. We really need to up our game there a little in terms of
> professional appearance. Looking at these very professional websites
> (and taking into account how much time it takes to do such a thing
> properly), we need to think about how to implement this. We do have a
> number of powerful components available (Chameleon, all the Bootstrap
> basics, I also have some not-yet-released extra code to use further
> Bootstrap features on the Wiki), but it will still be work to use that
> on our site (change table-based layouts on wiki pages; choose fonts,
> colours, images, and textures; style key elements; redesign site
> navigation to go with a collapsing menu, ...). How could we best move
> forward to put this into practice, ideally before the end of this year?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Markus
>
>
> > ----- Am 17. Okt 2014 um 11:58 schrieb Stephan Gambke s7ep...@gmail.com:
> >
> >> Well, I plan to maintain the skin for a while yet, not least because I
> >> use it myself.
> >>
> >> I want to finally release a version 1.0 this weekend. Should have done
> >> that a long time ago, but always put it off. There is one major issue
> >> left that I want to fix before, which is the un-responsiveness of the
> >> navbar. Should not be too hard to do, somebody recently sent me some
> >> code I think I can use. :)
> >>
> >> There are some rough edges left, but they are mostly related to
> >> styling of special pages and the like and should be easy to fix
> >> (patches welcome).
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Stephan
> >>
> >> On 17 October 2014 10:40, Markus Krötzsch <
> mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> Good idea. Chameleon is great (also because of the nice Bootstrap
> >>> styling that becomes available on all pages). I am using it right now
> to
> >>> build a site (to be published soon).
> >>>
> >>> A big advantage with Chameleon is that most customizations happen in
> CSS
> >>> or by inserting HTML into the page through configuration files. so
> there
> >>> are fewer dependencies on how MW does their skinning in PHP -- assuming
> >>> that Chameleon is always updated to support this properly.
> >>>
> >>> My only concern would be that Chameleon is still classified Beta. It
> >>> would be good to know if we can hope for future support for this if we
> >>> switch now.
> >>>
> >>> Cheers,
> >>>
> >>> Markus
> >>>
> >>> On 16.10.2014 19:52, James HK wrote:
> >>>> Hi,
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm calling for some opinions on replacing the "old" Vector skin on
> >>>> smw.org with something fresh. Stephan in his relentless pursuit of
> >>>> making MediaWiki more usable to non-Wikipedia users created the
> >>>> Chameleon skin [0] which seems more suitable to those who want to use
> >>>> MW/SMW in different environments.
> >>>>
> >>>> SMW no longer tries to be a product that seeks to fulfil requirements
> >>>> from either WMF or Wikipedia to be used as encyclopaedic semantic
> >>>> content management (that's now the job of Wikidata/Wikibase) therefore
> >>>> using the "Vector" skin somehow appears to be outdated by trying to
> >>>> look like the good old Wikipedia site.
> >>>>
> >>>> Furthermore, MW 1.24 (to be released soon) made some changes on how
> >>>> skins are deployed [1] and it might be a good time to say farewell to
> >>>> the "old" skin and rediscover SMW's identity by changing its
> >>>> appearance.
> >>>>
> >>>> [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Chameleon
> >>>> [1]
> >>>>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24#Skins_no_longer_loaded_after_upgrade.3F
> >>>>
> >>>> Cheers
> >>>>
> >>>>
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>
>
>
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