Cary wrote: ... monobook is getting old ... and it's marginally relevant to Wikimedia Commons ... so similar to many of the projects that it's not ... easy to tell that you've moved from one wiki to another ... But not all of us are good at designing skins ... how do we change it while upsetting the least amount of people? I propose ... a contest to come up with a new, more exciting monobook.css ... -C
Peter Blaise responds: I know this is a "commons" discussion list, so my contribution in this thread is specious, but where else should we discuss this ... and you started it! So...
Although I agree with much of your observations, I disagree with your conclusions.
I suggest that we instead design a new MediaWiki front end to allow the look and feel and function of any MediaWiki element to be customized USING MediaWiki directly through the same interface everyone else uses.
... 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!
I hope my 2 cents catches someone's imagination. I'm not up to either task - customizing MediaWiki using the current resources as a one-off design, nor programming such a modern interface enhancement tool as an upgrade included into MediaWiki. I just want one. And the people I'm trying to get to adopt MediaWiki would really appreciate it.
That said, keeping everything as "Wikipedia" as possible makes training and experience with one transferable to any other. "Have you seen Wikipedia?" "Yes." "Well, then, THIS is the exactly same. Dive in and enjoy!" Works for me.
In other words, I'm reframing the challenge: rather than adding yet another one-off skin, why not design a "skin designer" and incorporate it right into MediaWiki?
;-) -- Peter Blaise