* Siebrand Mazeland <s.mazeland(a)xs4all.nl> [Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:04:56
+0100]:
If this is merged after the 1.16 branching, and
support for old skins
would be dropped from 1.17 on, you'll be able to use the old skinning
system up to EOL of 1.16 as a supported version, expected somewhere
around March 2011 or a few months later. Should give you ample time to
prepare for MediaWiki 1.18 or whatever is the current version then...
If I understand correctly, current js2-work branch will be a base for
1.17? Is there any way to make old MonoBook derived skins to be
compatible with js2 code? I have lots of them. Actually, since long time
skin implementation code was fast but has very non-modular structure
with no clear data and visualization separation, no structurized methods
for sidebar, tooltips and so on. Templating was done in the far past
(CBT) but that probably was considered not efficient enough for heavy
load sites. For the efficiency, it should be possible to write a skin
generator, where the nice templatable format of skin will be converted
to efficient but spaghetti-like PHP code. Also, incremental CSS changes
can be made automatically then. I wonder how should I prepare my
monobook-derived skins to make them easier to upgrade someday.
Dmitriy