Hi design list,
You may remember me as the person who introduced the Erudite skin a few months ago. Since that time I've made lots of changes to it locally that are almost ready to go back up to the version on Mediawiki's servers.
Major changes include: - ability to set a top banner to an your own image in LocalSettings.php - ability to add extra content sections to the columns on the footer using system messages (the same way the main navigation can be customised; editing pages like MediaWiki:Erudite-extracontent-column2) - width is not fixed, but flexes to use the space appropriately - generally heaps of smaller style improvements
There are two issues I see in getting the changes upstream, though.
1) Any visible style change seems to have great difficulty being accepted. I found this with a few changes I submitted months ago: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/32035/ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/32036/ With the reviews always coming back "fine, needs approval from someone else". I think this may be a more general issue making design changes difficult to do.
2) Partly due to the above difficulties, partly due to my own time pressures, there are a large number of changes between the version currently in git and my current code. Moreover I would like to update the current code to conform to the Mediawiki style guide, but this would make the diff even more massive.
I could rejig my code into some separate patches, but they would each be quite large and interdependant. What would be the best way to contribute my improvements?
Nick