[Commons-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Monobook.css update?

[Bryan Tong Minh]

And forwarded back to Commons-l

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>
Date: Jun 15, 2007 7:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Commons-l] Monobook.css update?
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


On 6/15/07, Robert Leverington <lcarsdata at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > ... instead of having to search for and find and hand edit *.css, *.js,
> > *.ini, *.conf, *.php and so on files.  I say, do all that programming
> > ONCE, and do it INSIDE a new version of the MediaWiki distribution
> > program.  Then let sysops/admins tweak everything to their heart's
> > content from within the MediaWiki program without having to become
> > OS/MySQL/PHP/CSS/and-so-on programming nerds (with NO documentation
> > skills, apparently?!?).  You want the commons blue?  Make it blue from
> > WITHIN MediaWiki, rather than hand coding a new *.css!

You seem to be confusing two issues: the ability to edit styles from
within MediaWiki, and the ability to do it without technical know-how.
 We have the former: you can do a tremendous amount with
MediaWiki:Monobook.css, even though no projects that I know of have
done more than tiny tweaks.  You could, for instance, change
background images, fonts, positioning, and so on.  If you look at the
HTML source, for instance, the navigation sidebar is marked up
identically to the content action buttons (talk, edit, history, ...):
it's just CSS that distinguishes the two, having one arranged
vertically on the left with bullets and the other horizontally on the
top in boxes, and that can be changed from within the wiki.

The second issue is the knowledge of CSS required to do all this.
That part is substantial.  If someone wants to design a simple
special-page extension that will generate a pretty interface to the
CSS, perhaps the Foundation would be interested in enabling it on its
wikis.  Then again, perhaps not, if it prefers uniformity among its
own projects (and I think you can make a strong argument for that --
although all things being equal, I'd guess the Foundation would let
its wikis style things however the community wants them).  Either way,
I'm personally not interested in coding such a thing, but if someone
else wants to, they can go ahead.

> This idea is very interesting, I can already imagine what this could
> look like - I am forwarding this to the wikitech-l mailing list so
> that the people involved in that can also add their ideas. No doubt
> this would require some nifty JavaScript though.

It wouldn't require JavaScript unless you wanted to get really fancy,
like letting people drag around interface elements.  A simple form
allowing entry of various colors, borders, background images, etc.
would suffice, with some extra options for moving around stuff like
the logo and parts of the sidebar.

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