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.