On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Benoît Evellin <benoit.evellin(a)wikimedia.fr
wrote:
...
This new design is quite ready, and we planned to deploy it on our
common.css a few weeks ago in order to run some tests with new users. But
some users has some rationale concerns about the deployment itself: we
planed to create a new design by adding new CSS to the common.css file.
It looks like this would change the appearance of every page in the Aide
namespace, I can see why people might be nervous. Maybe there's a way to
have CSS rules that only activate on some pages in the Aide: namespace.
This involves an important risk of conflict if there
is an important skin
update in the future.
That's always the case. Someone has to update software.
For us, next steps are:
1/ validate the choices we made for this new interface,
2/ create a separate skin (with an extension? An other solution?).
Why do you need a separate skin? If these commons.css rules that only apply
to the Aide: namespace do the right thing, then I'm not sure what the
benefit of a custom skin is. I don't know how a custom skin can make only
minor tweaks to an existing skin like Vector.
If you do decide to make a custom skin, you will need to develop it and get
it reviewed and approved for deployment on the WMF cluster, and I think you
will also need to get either
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SkinPerPage or
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SkinPerNamespace reviewed and
approved for deployment to configure which pages or namespaces get this
skin. (I have some interest in getting one of these extensions deployed on
mediawiki.org for the Living style guide and/or a developer hub so they can
use a different skin like Blueprint.)
* in order to deploy this new design, we can create an
extension.
Do you mean in addition to the new skin, or just an extension that can be
smart about loading the CSS for the special look?
We have volunteers for this, with strong skills (some
of them are already
volunteers developers for MediaWiki). But is it the best way? Is there
other ideas or solutions?
It depends what you need. Many skin experts don't participate on the design
mailing list; you could ask on wikitech-l with a better description of what
you're trying to do.
Cheers,
--
=S Page WMF Tech writer