On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Benoît Evellin <benoit.evellin@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