Daniel Friesen
<lists(a)nadir-seen-fire.com> wrote:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Skinning_system/New_skin_layout
I have some plans for a new way of laying out skins in a new skin system.
The key changes being; The creation of new region block handling in the
system (default skins typically just including a standard body region
and messages region) to replace newtalk, sitenotice, the jsmessage div,
bodytext, catlinks, and dataAfterContent (used by flaggedrevs, smw, and
other extensions). And changes to what types of navigation we support
and how dominant the location of the toolbox is.
This new layout and system will likely be done using a planned xml/html
based template syntax.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Skinning_system/Monobook_template
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Skinning_system#xml.2Fhtml_templ…
Did you see Zope Page Templates
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/ZPT.stx
There is even a PHP implementation out there (TAL).
It's a consistent and mature system (I still prefer
tagsoup-like templating, but that has obvious disadvantages).
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Skinning_system/Skin_examination
I would also like to eventually eliminate our three skins using the
legacy system (Nostalgia, Standard/Classic, Cologne Blue). They don't
"properly" use our SkinTemplate system and require another 930+ lines of
code dedicated to their support, full of code duplication which
repeatedly gets in the way of new features because we insist that any
change we make to the ui should be backported to also work with legacy code.
That depends whether you want to change people or the system. I happened
to survive a whole Monobook era on either Standard, Simple and finally
settled down on Nostalgia due to its unique feature of having dropdown
list of specialpages (I use [[Special:Specialpages]] a lot). Then
switched to Vector with some reluctance, but finally accepted it.
If you plan to have a new, pretty and universal templating system
for the skins, please do try to accommodate those as a challenge.
It is also worth looking at some non-MediaWiki supplied skins,
like one of my almost favourites Beagle
(
http://beagle-project.org/skins/beagle-skin.tar.gz, that one
builds on QuickTemplate/Monobook I think) but you
fill find many others. It could be interesting to see those
that depart from the typical MediaWiki look (you know,
that thing that makes you type "Special:RecentChanges" in the
URL bar :)
Not to mention the ever-recurrng subject of the mobile site :)
//Marcin