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.
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?
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
The skinning is a very actual problem for MediaWiki. The skin is very nice, you're the great designer! I think it would be ideal for the classic encyclopedias. I tried to signup but I still don't have the rights to upload the file to see how the text full of pictures will look like. ----- Yury Katkov
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Nick White nick.white@durham.ac.uk 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.
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?
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Hi Nick!
Abnother question for you: where should the wiki logo be for this skin? how can the wikiadmin customize it? I mean the logo in the upper right corners seems to be not on its proper place. ----- Yury Katkov
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Yury Katkov katkov.juriy@gmail.com wrote:
The skinning is a very actual problem for MediaWiki. The skin is very nice, you're the great designer! I think it would be ideal for the classic encyclopedias. I tried to signup but I still don't have the rights to upload the file to see how the text full of pictures will look like.
Yury Katkov
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Nick White nick.white@durham.ac.ukwrote:
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.
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?
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Hi Yury,
Cool, glad you like it! And I'm not a great designer, the person who created the original Wordpress version is. The GPL just helps good design spread ;)
I just enabled image upload rights. Let me know if you need anything else.
As for the wiki logo (mentioned in your other reply,) it just uses the $wgLogo setting from LocalSettings.php, as the other skins do. To be honest the logo position is the part I'm least sure about. If you have a better suggestion of where to put it, do say.
Nick
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 06:19:10PM +0400, Yury Katkov wrote:
Hi Nick!
Abnother question for you: where should the wiki logo be for this skin? how can the wikiadmin customize it? I mean the logo in the upper right corners seems to be not on its proper place.
Yury Katkov
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Yury Katkov katkov.juriy@gmail.com wrote:
The skinning is a very actual problem for MediaWiki. The skin is very nice, you're the great designer! I think it would be ideal for the classic encyclopedias. I tried to signup but I still don't have the rights to upload the file to see how the text full of pictures will look like. ----- Yury Katkov On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Nick White <nick.white@durham.ac.uk> 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. 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? Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks. Nick White 1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/ The_Unified_Republic_of_Stars:Skin 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/ _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
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.
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On 09/21/2012 11:07 AM, Daniel Friesen 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.
Thanks for doing that, Daniel.
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.
Well, just because we haven't done something in the past doesn't mean we're dead set against doing it in the future. :-) For example, we've started bundling certain extensions with MediaWiki tarballs. The MediaWiki release process is in flux and open to new ideas -- non-Wikimedia Foundation folks (Mark Hershberger to start) are now creating some, as you can see on the wikitech-l and mediawiki-l lists. So perhaps they should take a new look at what skins should be included, or how to point MediaWiki administrators towards selected well-maintained skins (including some that are more innovative and less MediaWiki-centric).
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
Good luck, Nick, and thanks for making a new skin!
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.
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.comwrote:
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.
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1:
http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star...
2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
~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 mailto: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. > Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks. > > Nick White > > > 1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Stars:Skin > 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite > 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/ ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Design@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 09/21/2012 01:28 PM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
~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.
I think we might have gotten to the point where this conversation ought to be on wikitech-l instead.
But just to clarify how the skins and legacy stuff works, for the benefit of Nick and other folks on this list who may be less familiar: the older skins such as "CologneBlue", "Nostalgia", and "Standard" are stored alongside Vector, etc. in the [mediawiki/core.git]/skins/ directory. Those older skins all extend SkinLegacy, which you can see in [mediawiki/core.git]/includes/SkinLegacy.php [0].
MediaWiki's core codebase gets changed when one of the MediaWiki core owners approves a change. (The list of people who can do that is in Gerrit [1].) So to remove those legacy skins from MediaWiki, Daniel would have to submit a changeset removing those skins and SkinLegacy.php, and then have that removal approved. But likely, for a substantive change like that, we'd want a discussion on the wikitech-l list or an RfC on mediawiki.org.
Nick, one more thing -- have you already tested your skin on various mobile devices?
[0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/core.git;a=blob;f=includes... [1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/groups/11,members
Daniel Friesen, 21/09/2012 19:28:
~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 ;).
Actually this skin looks a lot like nostalgia to me, compare: https://www.dur.ac.uk/nick.white/erudite-demo/mediawiki-current/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=nostalgia
Nemo
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On 12-09-21 8:07 AM, Daniel Friesen 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.
The repo has been created and the tarball has been imported into it: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/skins/erudite.git;a=summar...
Sometime soon I'll try to fix some of the big issues with it.
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.
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On 09/24/2012 03:56 PM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
The repo has been created and the tarball has been imported into it: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/skins/erudite.git;a=summar...
Sometime soon I'll try to fix some of the big issues with it.
I asked Daniel for a time by which other people should feel free to work on fixing the issues with Drafts, in case he doesn't:
If I don't get around to it by the end of today then it'll disappear from my priority list, so that's a good marker. However most of the issues I'm going to fix are trivially small. And hence I'll probably push the change within minutes of creating it. So if you're thinking of fixing something... then I'm probably not working on it so just go ahead. If you're worried just ping me in #mediawiki (Dantman / DanielFriesen) to double check.
Thanks, Daniel.
2012/9/21 Nick White nick.white@durham.ac.uk:
If anybody interested could take a look, and give me feedback, that would be wonderful.
It looks nice, but the only useful way to test it is to fill it with some actual articles. Unless I'm missing something, currently it only has a main page with Lorem Ipsum. You can export some using Special:Export in a Wikipedia in any language. Come to think of it, this skin may work even better with Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource or Wikibooks.
Some other comments that I have just from seeing the main page:
1. Is the main Lorem Ipsum page in Russian just for me because I have it defined in my browser as one of my preferred languages, or is it Russian for everybody?
2. More importantly, why use Lorem Ipsum when you can use an actual Wikipedia main page?
3. Putting the search box at the bottom is a bad practice in some WordPress skins, and it shouldn't be carried over.
4. The :first-letter CSS selector is not guaranteed to work nicely with all languages. This is not, by itself, a reason not to use it; just take it into the consideration. For example, you can make it easy to disable it for some languages.
-- Amir
----- Yury Katkov
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
2012/9/21 Nick White nick.white@durham.ac.uk:
If anybody interested could take a look, and give me feedback, that would be wonderful.
It looks nice, but the only useful way to test it is to fill it with some actual articles. Unless I'm missing something, currently it only has a main page with Lorem Ipsum. You can export some using Special:Export in a Wikipedia in any language. Come to think of it, this skin may work even better with Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource or Wikibooks.
Some other comments that I have just from seeing the main page:
- Is the main Lorem Ipsum page in Russian just for me because I have
it defined in my browser as one of my preferred languages, or is it Russian for everybody?
Sorry, I'm the Russian guy ;), I added this text. I will help to fill the wiki with something else.
- More importantly, why use Lorem Ipsum when you can use an actual
Wikipedia main page?
here I think will be some problems: there are many things written in Common.css and Common.js on wikipedia, and there are also pictures and surely some hacks...
- Putting the search box at the bottom is a bad practice in some
WordPress skins, and it shouldn't be carried over.
I absolutely agree! The searchbox is better to be on it's usual place: in the right upper corner, or maybe left upper.
- The :first-letter CSS selector is not guaranteed to work nicely
with all languages. This is not, by itself, a reason not to use it; just take it into the consideration. For example, you can make it easy to disable it for some languages.
-- Amir
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Nick, do you use some open source hosting where we can add bugs, feature requests, watching the progress and participating?
Here are some problems I faced when I tried the markup: * too small fonts in various places: thumb caption, edit page (watch this page and minor edit) * here is a copy of Help:Formatting page: https://www.dur.ac.uk/nick.white/erudite-demo/mediawiki-current/index.php?ti... as you can see lots of elements displayed incorrectly. After you skin all the standard elements I suppose you'll need to write proper css for commonly used mediawiki css-classes, like "wikitable". * I think that the buttons in the editors should be skinned as well
Here is a good tutorial (maybe a bit outdated) about skinning, it helped me a lot:
http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/ ----- Yury Katkov
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Nick White nick.white@durham.ac.uk 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.
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?
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Sorry, I haven't been able to follow the discussion 'til now.
I'm glad the skin met with (general) approval, and was happy to read the fruitful discussion.
One miscellaneous point that's worth making. At present the CSS is structured so that erudite.css is an exact copy of the original wordpress CSS, and wikistyle.css has various definitions and overrides of that to work well as a mediawiki skin. It would probably make sense to just merge the two files, so things were clearer and cleaner. There are also quite a few parts of erudite.css which aren't used at all with the mediawiki theme, which should probably be removed.
I'll reply to various messages in the thread below.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:07:48 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
There are a few issues. Some small ones inside the code and the file layout seems to have been misunderstood.
Thanks for taking a look. It would be great if you could enumerate what these issues were. If you were just planning to fix them yourself, I can just look at the git log, though.
I'm very happy to help fix stuff up as appropriate; let me know of anything that'd be useful.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:07:48 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
This is really a WP theme shoehorned into MW
That's where it comes from, yes. But to me it doesn't feel particularly "second class"; the wiki controls aren't hidden away, and nor are the standard wiki links.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:34:07 -0400, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Nick, one more thing -- have you already tested your skin on various mobile devices?
No, that's one thing I haven't done at all. I don't have access to any mobile devices, either, so I'd ask others who do to maybe have a look at it with them, and report any issues with it.
On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:56:09 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
The repo has been created and the tarball has been imported into it: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/skins/erudite.git;a=summar...
Sometime soon I'll try to fix some of the big issues with it.
Cool, thanks for adding it to that git repo. Let me know if there's anything I can help with (if I did want to make changes, what would be the appropriate workflow? a patch to this mailing list?)
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:51:36 -0700, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- Putting the search box at the bottom is a bad practice in some
WordPress skins, and it shouldn't be carried over.
The search box certainly could be moved to float right of the main navigation at the top. To me it looks a little clunkier there, it certainly makes it easier to find.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:51:36 -0700, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- The :first-letter CSS selector is not guaranteed to work nicely
with all languages. This is not, by itself, a reason not to use it; just take it into the consideration. For example, you can make it easy to disable it for some languages.
I'm not sure about the :first-letter stuff in the skin. It looks nice for english, but characters with diacritics can touch the edge of the background image, which can make things unclear. I kept it mainly to stay truer to the wordpress theme this is based on, but maybe it would be a better idea just to get rid of it.
Right, I think that answers all the outstanding questions people had. Let me know if not. As I say, I'm happy to help with the skin however I may, and thanks for taking an interest in it.
Nick
On 12-09-25 3:59 AM, Nick White wrote:
Sorry, I haven't been able to follow the discussion 'til now.
I'm glad the skin met with (general) approval, and was happy to read the fruitful discussion.
One miscellaneous point that's worth making. At present the CSS is structured so that erudite.css is an exact copy of the original wordpress CSS, and wikistyle.css has various definitions and overrides of that to work well as a mediawiki skin. It would probably make sense to just merge the two files, so things were clearer and cleaner. There are also quite a few parts of erudite.css which aren't used at all with the mediawiki theme, which should probably be removed.
I'll reply to various messages in the thread below.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:07:48 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
There are a few issues. Some small ones inside the code and the file layout seems to have been misunderstood.
Thanks for taking a look. It would be great if you could enumerate what these issues were. If you were just planning to fix them yourself, I can just look at the git log, though.
Most of them are just easier for me to fix. I've done a few of them so far.
I'm very happy to help fix stuff up as appropriate; let me know of anything that'd be useful.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:07:48 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
This is really a WP theme shoehorned into MW
That's where it comes from, yes. But to me it doesn't feel particularly "second class"; the wiki controls aren't hidden away, and nor are the standard wiki links.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:34:07 -0400, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Nick, one more thing -- have you already tested your skin on various mobile devices?
No, that's one thing I haven't done at all. I don't have access to any mobile devices, either, so I'd ask others who do to maybe have a look at it with them, and report any issues with it.
On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:56:09 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
The repo has been created and the tarball has been imported into it: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/skins/erudite.git;a=summar...
Sometime soon I'll try to fix some of the big issues with it.
Cool, thanks for adding it to that git repo. Let me know if there's anything I can help with (if I did want to make changes, what would be the appropriate workflow? a patch to this mailing list?)
Sign up for developer access: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access
You (and everyone else) will be able to submit changes to the repo using Gerrit.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:51:36 -0700, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- Putting the search box at the bottom is a bad practice in some
WordPress skins, and it shouldn't be carried over.
The search box certainly could be moved to float right of the main navigation at the top. To me it looks a little clunkier there, it certainly makes it easier to find.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:51:36 -0700, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- The :first-letter CSS selector is not guaranteed to work nicely
with all languages. This is not, by itself, a reason not to use it; just take it into the consideration. For example, you can make it easy to disable it for some languages.
I'm not sure about the :first-letter stuff in the skin. It looks nice for english, but characters with diacritics can touch the edge of the background image, which can make things unclear. I kept it mainly to stay truer to the wordpress theme this is based on, but maybe it would be a better idea just to get rid of it.
Right, I think that answers all the outstanding questions people had. Let me know if not. As I say, I'm happy to help with the skin however I may, and thanks for taking an interest in it.
Nick
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On 12-09-25 7:47 AM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
On 12-09-25 3:59 AM, Nick White wrote:
Sorry, I haven't been able to follow the discussion 'til now.
I'm glad the skin met with (general) approval, and was happy to read the fruitful discussion.
One miscellaneous point that's worth making. At present the CSS is structured so that erudite.css is an exact copy of the original wordpress CSS, and wikistyle.css has various definitions and overrides of that to work well as a mediawiki skin. It would probably make sense to just merge the two files, so things were clearer and cleaner. There are also quite a few parts of erudite.css which aren't used at all with the mediawiki theme, which should probably be removed.
I'll reply to various messages in the thread below.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:07:48 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
There are a few issues. Some small ones inside the code and the file layout seems to have been misunderstood.
Thanks for taking a look. It would be great if you could enumerate what these issues were. If you were just planning to fix them yourself, I can just look at the git log, though.
Most of them are just easier for me to fix. I've done a few of them so far.
Ok, I'm done. I've dealt with all the issues I could see except for two.
Firstly, the top navigation. Ideally should really use makeListItem to generate the links but I don't remember if I included functionality to let you key in extra patterns for classes/ids. But more importantly `$this->data['sidebar']['navigation']` is not a proper way to build a flat header navigation. Though right now we don't have a standard way to do it in core. So we end up adding a new navigation message for every skin like this and rewriting the same kind of code over and over.
Secondly, the new pages list. Doing a DB query like this on every page view isn't acceptable. Something like this should be cached. Additionally str_replace on rc_title is not a proper way to output the text of a new page. The Title class should be used. The way it's being done will do things like omit the namespace. It's also not properly escaped so it's a potential XSS vector. Using skin as the Linker is deprecated. And it's using the wrong linker method to build the link (though makeListItem might be the right one instead of the Linker).
I do understand that some skins would want to incorporate something like that. So I would be in favour of building a stripped down NewPagesPager that doesn't have all the options, caches the result in the wiki's cache, and then calling it something like NewPagesWidget and making some others like it for skins that need that kind of functionality.
I'm very happy to help fix stuff up as appropriate; let me know of anything that'd be useful.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:07:48 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
This is really a WP theme shoehorned into MW
That's where it comes from, yes. But to me it doesn't feel particularly "second class"; the wiki controls aren't hidden away, and nor are the standard wiki links.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:34:07 -0400, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Nick, one more thing -- have you already tested your skin on various mobile devices?
No, that's one thing I haven't done at all. I don't have access to any mobile devices, either, so I'd ask others who do to maybe have a look at it with them, and report any issues with it.
On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:56:09 -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
The repo has been created and the tarball has been imported into it: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/skins/erudite.git;a=summar...
Sometime soon I'll try to fix some of the big issues with it.
Cool, thanks for adding it to that git repo. Let me know if there's anything I can help with (if I did want to make changes, what would be the appropriate workflow? a patch to this mailing list?)
Sign up for developer access: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access
You (and everyone else) will be able to submit changes to the repo using Gerrit.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:51:36 -0700, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- Putting the search box at the bottom is a bad practice in some
WordPress skins, and it shouldn't be carried over.
The search box certainly could be moved to float right of the main navigation at the top. To me it looks a little clunkier there, it certainly makes it easier to find.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:51:36 -0700, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- The :first-letter CSS selector is not guaranteed to work nicely
with all languages. This is not, by itself, a reason not to use it; just take it into the consideration. For example, you can make it easy to disable it for some languages.
I'm not sure about the :first-letter stuff in the skin. It looks nice for english, but characters with diacritics can touch the edge of the background image, which can make things unclear. I kept it mainly to stay truer to the wordpress theme this is based on, but maybe it would be a better idea just to get rid of it.
Right, I think that answers all the outstanding questions people had. Let me know if not. As I say, I'm happy to help with the skin however I may, and thanks for taking an interest in it.
Nick
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 09:54:39AM -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
Ok, I'm done. I've dealt with all the issues I could see except for two.
Great, thanks for all your work, Daniel. And thanks for the readable commit messages; I found them very instructive :)
Secondly, the new pages list.
Going off on a bit of a tangent, I wonder whether there is (or should be) a standard area for extensions to add extra 'miscellaneous' links. I'm thinking in my case that I probably want to add a few "export as xyz format" buttons, but ideally it would be nice to do that without having to change the skin. Something like $this->data['extension_urls'] could work, but I wonder whether it would be generally useful, or whether there's a better way to do that?
The New Pages list is a particularly good example of links which will be desirable for some sites, but not for others, and it might be nice if there were some way outside of skin modification to change what appeared there.
Thanks again everybody, especially Daniel.
Nick
On 09/25/2012 06:59 AM, Nick White wrote:
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:34:07 -0400, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Nick, one more thing -- have you already tested your skin on various mobile devices?
No, that's one thing I haven't done at all. I don't have access to any mobile devices, either, so I'd ask others who do to maybe have a look at it with them, and report any issues with it.
For that, I recommend you write to the Wikimedia mobile mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
I've now setup a new page for the skin at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Erudite
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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.
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?
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing back from folks.
Nick White
1: http://www.unifiedrepublicofstars.com/reference/The_Unified_Republic_of_Star... 2: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/the-erudite 3: http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 11:55:41AM -0700, Daniel Friesen wrote:
I've now setup a new page for the skin at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Erudite
Awesome, thanks. One slight quibble: to the best of my knowledge, it's licensed GPLv2, not GPLv2+. I'd be happy with v2+, but there's no mention of "or later" in anything from Matt or Colin. I could ask them if it would be useful to get it or later'd.
Nick