For the longest time, core skins had a big advantage: they could use the
'skinStyles' parameter of a ResourceLoader module definition, in core's
Resources.php file, to provide different looks for various built-in
functionality. Non-core skin creators could achieve the same by putting
the styles in main skin styles, but this has two big disadvantages: the
styles would be loaded even if not needed on given page, and one often had
to use ugly hacks to "reset" core styles.
With [1] merged, non-core skins can finally do the same, and do it right,
using the new $wgResourceModuleSkinStyles global (akin to
$wgResourceModules):
// Module defined in core or some extension
$wgResourceModules['bar'] = array(
'scripts' => 'resources/bar/bar.js',
'styles' => 'resources/bar/main.css',
);
// Styles defined in the skin
$wgResourceModuleSkinStyles['foo'] = array(
'bar' => 'skins/Foo/bar.css',
);
Documentation is available at
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgResourceModuleSkinStyles>.
I have already converted Vector to make use of this [2] and I am in the
process of doing the same for Minerva [3][4] (the second patch still
pending, reviews welcome) – MobileFrontend developers were forced to do
some really bad things by the previous limitations ;)
Perhaps someone would be interested in doing this for MonoBook, too? It
currently uses the "everything in main style file" approach.
Have fun!
[1]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/141259/
[2]
http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/1ebad72b0b45209ab0456271…
[3]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/149780/
[4]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/150580/
--
Matma Rex