MatmaRex (Bartosz Dziewoski) recently rewrote the CologneBlue skin for better compatibility with modern MediaWiki standards -- see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:mediawiki/core+bran... . In case you're interested, here's what he learned:
"The things I learned are really mostly applicable to rewriting cologneblue again ;) (or maybe other legacy skins). One big gotcha was documented in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/29422/ , another was a tiny little bug i fixed in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/26819/ , last one was https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/26808/ - and I'd say that's it. All or most of the ugly things there were probably caused by lack of a standardised interface like the SkinTemplate, so every skin had to reimplement basic stuff like navigation. And then we have code duplication, and it all being reimplemented slightly differently in SkinTemplate, and legacy skins not supporting new hooks, because nobody cared. But that's the usual story."
Anyone else trying to rewrite old MediaWiki skins? Any lessons learned?
Has this been implemented in the recently released ver. 1.20.0 ?
john foster On Nov 20, 2012 3:25 PM, "Sumana Harihareswara" sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
MatmaRex (Bartosz Dziewoski) recently rewrote the CologneBlue skin for better compatibility with modern MediaWiki standards -- see
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:mediawiki/core+bran... . In case you're interested, here's what he learned:
"The things I learned are really mostly applicable to rewriting cologneblue again ;) (or maybe other legacy skins). One big gotcha was documented in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/29422/ , another was a tiny little bug i fixed in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/26819/ , last one was https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/26808/ - and I'd say that's it. All or most of the ugly things there were probably caused by lack of a standardised interface like the SkinTemplate, so every skin had to reimplement basic stuff like navigation. And then we have code duplication, and it all being reimplemented slightly differently in SkinTemplate, and legacy skins not supporting new hooks, because nobody cared. But that's the usual story."
Anyone else trying to rewrite old MediaWiki skins? Any lessons learned?
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
2012/11/20 John Foster jfoster81747@gmail.com:
Has this been implemented in the recently released ver. 1.20.0 ?
I'm afraid the CologneBlue rewrite didn't make it into 1.20; you could use the git master or one of the 1.21wmfN versions (they're pretty stable – the Wikipedias run on them, after all): see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download#Development_releases , once you clone the git repository, you can use "git checkout" to extract any version (they're branched).
I don't know what's the usual procedure with backporting things; maybe it could be landed in 1.20.1 or something.
-- Matma Rex / Bartosz Dziewoński
On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 8:29 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
I don't know what's the usual procedure with backporting things; maybe it could be landed in 1.20.1 or something.
-- Matma Rex / Bartosz Dziewoński
We tend to not back-port unless its to fix [major] breakage.
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