On 2/9/10 4:07 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:56 PM, PlatonidesPlatonides@gmail.com wrote:
We will be glad to have you on it, Trevor. Rewriting the skin system is not urgent, although I would like to have a newskin compatible vector skin before releasing 1.16. This way, we wouldn't be forced to support an old vector design.
Since when do we support skins at all? We change them incompatibly on every release anyway. With any luck, we could cut back on that if we moved to a sane system, but I wouldn't block 1.16 on it. I wouldn't hold off on committing either, though, if it can be demonstrated that the skins' output remains byte-for-byte the same except whitespace.
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I see that there are 3 steps to achieving sanity in MediaWiki skinning.
1. Remove all skins other than Monobook and Vector. 2. Write a more ideal skinning system. 3. Port Monobook and Vector over to the new system.
Why only Monobook and Vector? 94%[1] of users on English Wikipedia are currently using one of them. They are both built on SkinTemplate, so porting will be a similar process. They are also different enough that they will effectively exercise the new system.
We also need to consider that a good general template class which any part of the MediaWiki can use for user interfaces would be a good thing to base this skin class on. This doesn't have to use any fancy syntax, just good old PHP in it's inline forms such as <?php if( $something ): ?>...<?php endif; ?> and <?php foreach( $things as $thing ): ?>...<?php endforeach; ?>. I have some code I've been playing around with that might be perfect for this.
In short, It's better to give users their choice of 3 decent skins than 10 crappy ones, and if we can make migration to the new system less painful, it's more likely to actually happen.
- Trevor
[1] English Wikipedia Skin Preferences
monobook 49.72% vector 44.16% modern 2.73% cologneblue 1.38% standard 0.73% chick 0.44% nostalgia 0.31% myskin 0.28% simple 0.24% amethyst 0.00%