On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
I've been chipping away at our skins system lately, there's a lot we can improve to improve the skins system. Right now there's a lot of it that doesn't work so nicely for an ecosystem promoting the creation of a wide variety of skins.
Glad to see this area getting some love!
- Adding /trunk/skins would require some (possibly small?) changes to
the Translation extension.
- ExtensionDistributor would also need tweaks.
-- However it was brought up that ExtensionDistributor doesn't work with /trunk/extensions/skins/ anyways, at least not if you're only trying to get one skin out. -- I think tweaking ExtensionDistributor to support /trunk/skins would be quite easy (at the simplest it's probably a case of making small tweaks to make a SkinDistributor that uses /trunk/skins instead of /trunk/extensions and whatnot)
One thought on that subject. The main distinction between the extensions directory and the skins directory is that the extensions directory is a set of zero or more extensions that are presumably complementary, none of which is required for proper operation of MediaWiki (ParserFunctions debate notwithstanding) The skins directory is set of at least one active skin along with zero or more mutually exclusive alternatives to the active skin.
One should implicitly be able to blow away the extensions directory, modify the LocalSettings.php file accordingly, and have a working MediaWiki install. It's worth exploring if this should be an explicit requirement or something we should drift from.
Oh, and lastly... if anyone knows of any "really" good WordPress or other CMS themes or templates I might consider porting some as examples.
Drupal's Zen theme would be a great choice, I think: http://drupal.org/project/zen
It's designed to be sort of a meta-theme that is very easy to customize. Here's the page with some of the contributed sub-themes: http://drupal.org/node/340837
Rob