The reason that I went the route of creating an extension vs a skin was that I wanted the most flexibility in adapting the content for mobile device rendering. There are a number of sections that need to be removed from the final output in order to render the content effectively on mobile devices. So, being able to use a PHP output buffer handling is a nice feature. I also wanted the ability to use many of the features that are available when writing an extension to hook into core functionality.
-- Patrick
On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 3:56 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
A few people (including myself) have expressed some concerns about the way in which the mobile site is being rewritten. I don't really think Bugzilla or MediaWiki.org are the appropriate forums for this, but this list probably is. (I assume Patrick Reilly is subscribed to this list. CC'ing him in any case.)
The previous mobile site was written in Ruby and does some of its own parsing. The rewrite is written in PHP and many people seem to agree that it should be some sort of "skin" system so that it's adaptable to other MediaWiki installations and doesn't try to do anything too crazy (like re-implement the parser). There are concerns that the current rewrite approach (in SVN in an extension called "PatchOutputMobile" for those curious) isn't the best, but it's completely possible there are reasons for the way it's being re-implemented.
Patrick or Tomasz: can you give an overview of what the current re-implementation strategy is?
- Relevant bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25558
- Relevant MediaWiki page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_site_rewrite
MZMcBride