And forwarded back to Commons-l
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com Date: Jun 15, 2007 7:51 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Commons-l] Monobook.css update? To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 6/15/07, Robert Leverington lcarsdata@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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