Hi folks,
We're hosting a conversation about standardization and continued development of front-end libraries in MW core on 6/25, 5:30 PM UTC, #wikimedia-office.
This is driven by a recognized need for teams at WMF to work more effectively on user-facing features and reduce duplication of efforts and inconsistencies across extensions. We're willing to take a bit of a hit on the short term velocity of feature development to build a more robust, consistent and developer-friendly platform.
Timo Tijhof, Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw have proposed a systematic effort to improve MW core's front-end libraries, building on existing efforts (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UX_standardization for a messy but reasonably comprehensive overview of some of the inconsistencies and wheel duplication we need to solve).
This will be done in partnership with other interested front-end engineers across the org and the community.
We'll try to come up with a clear scope of work, such as:
- having Mobile and VisualEditor depend on the same front-end libraries in MW core and use them effectively - eliminating dependencies on jQuery UI from all WMF-deployed code, to be replaced with a MediaWiki-native look and feel - creating a proper living style guide and UX standardization pipeline in partnership with the WMF UX team.
This conversation is just a first step to ensure this effort has visibility from the start, and major architectural changes will go through the usual public conversations.
Thanks,
Erik