On 2/9/10 4:07 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Platonides<platoni...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> We will be glad to have you on it, Trevor. Rewriting the skin system is >> not urgent, although I would like to have a newskin compatible vector >> skin before releasing 1.16. This way, we wouldn't be forced to support >> an old vector design. >> > Since when do we support skins at all? We change them incompatibly on > every release anyway. With any luck, we could cut back on that if we > moved to a sane system, but I wouldn't block 1.16 on it. I wouldn't > hold off on committing either, though, if it can be demonstrated that > the skins' output remains byte-for-byte the same except whitespace. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > I see that there are 3 steps to achieving sanity in MediaWiki skinning.
1. Remove all skins other than Monobook and Vector. 2. Write a more ideal skinning system. 3. Port Monobook and Vector over to the new system. Why only Monobook and Vector? 94%[1] of users on English Wikipedia are currently using one of them. They are both built on SkinTemplate, so porting will be a similar process. They are also different enough that they will effectively exercise the new system. We also need to consider that a good general template class which any part of the MediaWiki can use for user interfaces would be a good thing to base this skin class on. This doesn't have to use any fancy syntax, just good old PHP in it's inline forms such as <?php if( $something ): ?>...<?php endif; ?> and <?php foreach( $things as $thing ): ?>...<?php endforeach; ?>. I have some code I've been playing around with that might be perfect for this. In short, It's better to give users their choice of 3 decent skins than 10 crappy ones, and if we can make migration to the new system less painful, it's more likely to actually happen. - Trevor [1] English Wikipedia Skin Preferences monobook 49.72% vector 44.16% modern 2.73% cologneblue 1.38% standard 0.73% chick 0.44% nostalgia 0.31% myskin 0.28% simple 0.24% amethyst 0.00% _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
