Big changes are coming to MediaWiki's skin systems this summer; Friday at 18:00 UTC is a chance to ask for details, review code, and watch out for snags. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-06-20

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Redo_skin_framework has Trevor Parscal's proposal: "Skins can be made out of widgets, server and client side objects which render/manage discrete elements on the page. A skin can then have a standard API on the server and client, which other software can rely on."

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Separating_skins_from_core_MediaWiki has Bartosz's (MatmaRex's) work: "tl;dr Let's start putting all skins files in a single directory, and let's use a grown-up structure with one class per file + separate init code for them. Okay?" He also has several patches awaiting review, such as:

136325: beta: bring in mediawiki/skins.git 136531: SkinTemplate: Move $stylename to Skin and soft-deprecate 138652: Support for enabling skins in the installer 135413: Separate Vector skin from core 138795: Separate MonoBook skin from core 138368: Stop using a suboptimal structure for Vector's variants menu 138369: Stop using a suboptimal structure for Vector's variants menu (cont.) 136615: SpecialVersion: Show 'Skins' and 'Extensions' in separate sections

Links at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-06-20#T... . We'll meet in #wikimedia-office on Freenode. Time: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Skin+discussion&...

7pm-8pm London 2pm-3pm Washington, DC 11am-noon San Francisco

Sorry that the timing's bad for Asia/Australia; I know MatmaRex and Trevor do respond to onwiki/Gerrit comments if you want to comment there.

If we have extra time this Friday, perhaps people can comment on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Alternate_disclosure_pol... or https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/SOA_Authentication .