Have you considered using something like say XSL? If a skin was a combination of a set of CSS/JS/image files plus an XSL file which took XML data (which would be the page content and various user interface elements) then you could avoid using a whole new template system. PHP 5 has an XSL 1.0 library compiled by default, and since it's implemented in C, I would bet it's far more performant than any PHP implementation of a template system aside from using PHP itself as a template system.
Then again, there's a lot of people out there that dislike XSL for all sorts of reasons - which to me have always carried the ring of prejudice. I personally think XSL is awesome, and would defend it with vigor.
In any case, I'm excited about the work you are doing.
- Trevor
On 12/3/10 5:49 PM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
Perhaps I should commit what I have so far even though it's not quite ready for use yet.
It's enough to do this so far: http://testwiki.new.wiki-tools.com/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=tes... ((this runs off that ported monobook template I put in the pastie))
Right now I'm using smarty's eval: which I don't want to use because it re-compiles the template each time you run it. I really wanted to make use of MediaWiki's caching system because MW already has such a good caching system it's built in, and having to require extra permissions just to make smarty happy felt messed up.
I have a bad habit of starting projects for fun and experimenting them, then abandoning them later. The ones I finish are usually the ones with company backing, the really really simple ones, or ones with some other sort of backing or other people working on it to. So having someone else working on it too would probably be motivating. This came after experimenting with porting Wikia's Monaco skin (got 1/3 the way through), and after it I even started experimenting with writing an entire language embedded in php that could be used in MW. And there's my long lived vm based wiki farm experiment.
One possibility I suppose, would be to use the vector array as the standard, but hardcode monobook to flatten it and relocate the tagline.
Some ideas for the templates besides fixing caching... We should consider a method of doing personal_urls and whatnot using some blocks or functions that can aide in the generation of the links and make them simpler to build with tooltips and whatnot. Perhaps also some sort of block for content to automatically place the dataAfterContent. The sidebar block could be made better potentially. Besides footer_links we could also consider moving most of the toolbox out of monobook and whatnot. Converting it mostly into something you can loop through.
Btw, the new powered by icon, using a little more rounded and fancy background: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/skins/common/images/p... Anyone else think it feels slightly out of place in monobook? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?useskin=monobook I debated tweaking the poweredby, etc... buttons to instead use something a little more component style, where the content of the button is an image, but the bg is provided by the skin. Giving you the same style as before in monobook, but that nice new fancy style in vector.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
On 10-12-03 11:10 AM, Trevor Parscal wrote:
This is a really awesome project, I'm sure we can figure out a way for Vector and Monobook to be able to use the same arrays.
Let me know if you want some help.
- Trevor
On 12/2/10 6:30 PM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
On 10-12-02 04:52 PM, Platonides wrote:
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Paul Houlepaul@ontology2.com wrote:
Of all the code I've seen, the Mediawiki code seems to be one ofthe most difficult code bases to make simple changes in. When I had to change the template of a mediawiki once, the easiest answer I found was to put a proxy server in front of it, drop out the original template and spit the body text into a new template. (That said, this was a system I already had on the shelf that worked wonders for all sorts of commercial crapware)
What do you mean by "change the template of a mediawiki"? Do you mean templates in the MediaWiki sense, as in pages that can be transcluded into other pages? Or do you mean the skin? Skin HTML can usually be changed by just grepping a relevant class or id and editing some raw HTML, or a pretty simple wrapper layer. It can't be changed without hacking the code, so it's certainly a lot harder than in most popular web apps, but I'm pretty sure you can do it more easily in almost all cases than by postprocessing the HTML output.
Seems a Usability failure at developer users level. The proxying solution is completely wrong, yet WMF did it, too. And looking at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning it isn't friendly unless you already know what's it about.
I was experimenting with an extension to make creating php-less skins possible myself. http://pastie.org/1343349<- here's Monobook ported to a template
The biggest thing I see different from WordPress etc... is that there's a minimal amount of boilerplate in them. You don't have to copy the bottom boilerplate, there's no [dataAfterContent], you don't have things like our personal_urls where you have to code the whole tag manually calling to things to make tooltips, etc... and embedding code. The way the TOOLBOX has a bunch of stuff hardcoded into the skin isn't good. And IMHO those footerlinks should be part of MediaWiki instead of hardcoded into the skin. I wanted to make them part of the code, using an array in vector's style, making monobook use it, but fold it onto one line. Unfortunately I was stopped when I noticed that Vector moved tagline from the end, to the end of the first array, after copyright meaning they couldn't use the same array to get the same result.