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
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation