Hi all,
I'm Jack Phoenix [1], a MediaWiki developer whose primary interests are social tools [2] and skinning [3]. Skinning, especially when related to core MediaWiki, is a rather esoteric area where we don't have much developer capacity, the skinning system is obscure and not well-documented and as a direct result of this, MediaWiki has considerably fewer third-party skins than, for example, phpBB or WordPress. Although most of us can agree on the fact that the skin system needs an overhaul, that's quite a huge project which cannot be undertaken lightly nor without prior discussion and planning. Instead, I'm proposing a few steps in the right direction in my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014 proposal "A modern, scalable and attractive skin for MediaWiki" [4].
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_tools [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix/A_modern,_scalable_and_attr... )
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, -- Jack Phoenix MediaWiki developer