On 11-09-12 04:23 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 2:48 AM, Daniel Friesen
<lists(a)nadir-seen-fire.com> wrote:
On 11-09-11 04:56 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
I'm curious what problem you're trying to
solve. It sounds like
you're trying to get people who are currently working on Wordpress
skins or Drupal skins to work on MediaWiki skins instead, but to what
end?
The "going back to <x>" part tacked on the end was more of a
joke.
I'm trying to solve the flaws in our skin system especially the ones
where our skin system is deficient compared to other theme engines like
WordPress' and Drupal's. But also trying to avoid repeating some of the
same flaws in those skin systems. And taking our differences into
consideration.
I guess I'm asking for the most important user stories, since
trying
to be all things to all people is almost certainly going to fail. Is
the most important user (to you) an individual English Wikipedia
account holder who wants to switch away from the default theme, or a
MediaWiki administrator who wants to align the look-and-feel of their
Wordpress blog with their MediaWiki install? Do you imagine that the
person who creates the next great MediaWiki theme is someone who is a
CSS expert, or more of a programmer?
The focus of improving the skin system is
naturally the latter. Letting
someone with a MediaWiki install and a design take the two of them and
make them usable as one.
"the next great MediaWiki theme" is a non-goal. If we were going for the
great skin to replace Vector which replaced MonoBook, we'd just put it
in core.
I'm trying to eliminate the problems in the way of people easily
adopting MediaWiki and giving it their look as they can easily with
other engines. That's the purpose of a skin system, just about anything
else you could shove into core without an extensible skin system.
This thread spurred a small conversation in the office
over lunch
today. I won't speak for the group, but the conclusion I reached from
that conversation was that a more achievable and immediately solvable
problem to tackle would be to improve the ability to customize skins
purely from CSS. That is, create a new skin that makes it really easy
to move blocks of content (navigation elements, etc) around and
customize their appearance. I would love to see some alignment of
other theming systems with our own, so that we can potentially attract
theme experts from other projects to port their existing themes to
MediaWiki.
Not interested in a pure-CSS skin there's plenty of things that are
impossible to do from css.
There's no way we'll see a new innovative skin if it's stuck with the
same kind of markup we've been using. All we'll see is more MonoBook
clones like 90% of the existing MediaWiki skins are.
I only need to bring up one of the biggest problems I've noticed. Our
navigation. We only support the sidebar navigation within our skin
system. Any skin that uses navigation that doesn't fit within that very
narrow form of navigation needs to completely re-implement message
parsing or hardcode stuff.
Practically every client design I've seen -- and I'm talking about real
designs, for real organizations picking up MediaWiki -- has had a header
navigation. BASESwiki uses one, the CCA Wiki design I'm currently
turning into a skin uses one, just about every site I've seen us working
on for clients has had one, and nearly every WordPress theme I've seen
uses that type of navigation menu.
There's no way you can switch between sidebar navigation to header
navigation in pure css.
Rob
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]