tldr: If you have built skins or use skins that are not listed on MediaWiki.org, please list them [4] and check that they work with current MediaWiki.org. If you have always wanted to build a skin try the new tool and give me feedback on how you get on! [3].

Longer version:

As part of my involvement in the desktop improvements project  [1] I with the help of many others have been trying to simplify the development of skins.

As part of this, much-needed maintenance has occurred in MediaWiki core with the intention of making skin development easier.

As a personal goal, I wanted to prototype a tool to showcase the skins available in the ecosystem, and finally with the downtime of the holiday period (no deploys!) I've finally done that. It allows showcasing [2] and building skins [3].

While building this tool I was surprised to find that excluding forks of skins, there are only __55 skins__ listed on MediaWiki.org. Out of those, only 38 have been kept up to date.

I can't believe that given the age of this project there are only 38 usable skins and I am writing to you in the hope that:

1) You know of others that can be added to MediaWiki.org in the "Skin" namespace [4] Note, any edits to MediaWiki.org will automatically get picked up by the tool and listed.

2) If you build skins for closed source wikis, please consider publishing them over the holiday period if you can!

3) If you have fix skins that do not work with latest MediaWiki so I can showcase them on the new tool.

4) If you are inspired to make a new skin, possibly trying out the starter kit tool I have created [3] which will construct a working zip file that can be added to your local mediawiki and eventually github/gerrit and give me feedback via Phabricator/email/github what can be improved.

******

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Desktop_improvements

[2] https://skins.wmflabs.org/?

[3] https://skins.wmflabs.org/?#/add

[4]

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=Template%3ASkin%2FSample&title=Skin%3ANewSkin%20&venoscript=1

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