On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Paul
Houle<paul(a)ontology2.com> wrote:
Of all the code I've seen, the
Mediawiki code seems to be one of
the most difficult code bases to make simple changes in. When I had to
change the template of a mediawiki once, the easiest answer I found was
to put a proxy server in front of it, drop out the original template
and spit the body text into a new template. (That said, this was a
system I already had on the shelf that worked wonders for all sorts of
commercial crapware)
What do you mean by "change the template of a mediawiki"? Do you mean
templates in the MediaWiki sense, as in pages that can be transcluded
into other pages? Or do you mean the skin? Skin HTML can usually be
changed by just grepping a relevant class or id and editing some raw
HTML, or a pretty simple wrapper layer. It can't be changed without
hacking the code, so it's certainly a lot harder than in most popular
web apps, but I'm pretty sure you can do it more easily in almost all
cases than by postprocessing the HTML output.
Seems a Usability failure at developer users level.
The proxying solution is completely wrong, yet WMF did it, too.
And looking at