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(a)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