~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On 12-09-21 10:05 AM, Yury Katkov wrote:
Hi Daniel! 

> Honestly we generally don't include any theme someone just comes up with
> into core.
...and that's very bad. I don't have the proper statistics about what themes are in use on the MediaWiki installation, but I saw a lot of MW-wikis, and remember none of them that use Modern, Chickpea, Cologneblue, Standard, Simple or Nostalgia skin. My personal opinion that this is because those skins looks too Web1.0-ish or ugly.
They look Web1.0-ish because they were built when web was at 1.0 ;). They're just around for compat right now.
In fact, they're not just compat. They're tucked away in a set of code called legacy so that all I have to do to remove them from MW forever is git rm a few files.

In this case Nick adopted the Wordpress skin, maybe not properly, but you shouldn't be so dogmatic and say that the skin have no chance to be included into core. IMHO MediaWiki have very big problems with the skins: they're either ugly, or old, or designed specifically for one website. With the new beautiful skins more people will prefer MediaWiki to other solutions. Please, explain Nick's concrete mistakes instead of just being harsh.

And hey, there is a guy here who wants to help making MW more beautiful and is capable to do that. We all have to help him and provide as much materials and support as possible. 

-----
Yury Katkov




On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 7:07 PM, Daniel Friesen <daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com> wrote:
On 12-09-21 7:06 AM, Nick White wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to the list, and the mediawiki world. If this would be
> better directed elsewhere, let me know.
>
> I recently came across a skin for Mediawiki called Erudite[1], which
> is based on a Wordpress theme of the same name[2].
>
> I updated it to the work well with the current Mediawiki version,
> fix bugs, and try and ensure everything was general enough that it
> should work on any wiki with any extensions. As I say, I'm new to
> mediawiki, so my ideas on the best ways of doing things come largely
> from a blog post[3], the mediawiki wiki, and delving into
> mediawiki's code for things I wasn't sure about. It's possible I
> didn't follow best practises in some places, but I certainly tried
> to.
>
> I set up a new wiki demoing the skin (editing and creating accounts
> is enabled; try it out,) here:
> https://www.dur.ac.uk/nick.white/erudite-demo/mediawiki-current/
> And the code is all here:
> https://www.dur.ac.uk/nick.white/eruditeskin-0.9.4-r1.tar.bz2
> If anybody interested could take a look, and give me feedback, that
> would be wonderful.
There are a few issues. Some small ones inside the code and the file
layout seems to have been misunderstood.
It would be good to skip the tarball and put this into a Git repo.
I added the repo to the list of new repos to be created.

> I'd also ideally love the skin to be taken as one of the standard
> skins that is distributed with mediawiki. I think it's very
> attractive, and quite different to the other mediawiki themes I
> found, so could be a good fit. Might that be possible? How would I
> go about pushing that forward?
All of the skins that come with MediaWiki are designed precisely for
MediaWiki. From the very start. This is really a WP theme shoehorned
into MW, so I wouldn't really aim to have it included.
Honestly we generally don't include any theme someone just comes up with
into core. There are plenty of themes in the past designed specifically
for MediaWiki and none of them made it into core.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]


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