On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 2:48 AM, Daniel Friesen
<lists(a)nadir-seen-fire.com> wrote:
On 11-09-11 04:56 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
I'm curious what problem you're trying to
solve. It sounds like
you're trying to get people who are currently working on Wordpress
skins or Drupal skins to work on MediaWiki skins instead, but to what
end?
The "going back to <x>" part tacked on the end was more of a
joke.
I'm trying to solve the flaws in our skin system especially the ones
where our skin system is deficient compared to other theme engines like
WordPress' and Drupal's. But also trying to avoid repeating some of the
same flaws in those skin systems. And taking our differences into
consideration.
I guess I'm asking for the most important user stories, since trying
to be all things to all people is almost certainly going to fail. Is
the most important user (to you) an individual English Wikipedia
account holder who wants to switch away from the default theme, or a
MediaWiki administrator who wants to align the look-and-feel of their
Wordpress blog with their MediaWiki install? Do you imagine that the
person who creates the next great MediaWiki theme is someone who is a
CSS expert, or more of a programmer?
This thread spurred a small conversation in the office over lunch
today. I won't speak for the group, but the conclusion I reached from
that conversation was that a more achievable and immediately solvable
problem to tackle would be to improve the ability to customize skins
purely from CSS. That is, create a new skin that makes it really easy
to move blocks of content (navigation elements, etc) around and
customize their appearance. I would love to see some alignment of
other theming systems with our own, so that we can potentially attract
theme experts from other projects to port their existing themes to
MediaWiki.
Rob