Hi all! This is my proposal announcement for GSoC 2104:
Abstract
Appearance is most important for any site. Unfortunately, while MediaWiki is very advanced in functionality it lacks flexibility in terms of appearance. Vector skin is great, no doubt about it, but it seems there is no other alternative. Almost all wikis in the world look like Wikipedia. Of course one can apply their own CSS and customize the site's layout or even create their own skin in PHP but both solutions demand a lot of knowledge and effort and in the end nobody really does so except maybe for some big commercial sites.
My proposal is the creation of a frontend that will help users with little or no experience at all to easily produce all the CSS needed to change their wiki's layout.
Full proposal wiki page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Protnet/Frontend_for_Vector_skin_CSS_cus tomizations
It's still a draft but you can get most of the idea. I've learnt about GSoC a few days ago by chance so I didn't have much time to prepare it properly. Any last minute help would be most appreciated! And the most important thing is I still haven't found any possible mentors. Please help me on this!!
With regards, Ioannis Protonotarios Electrical & Computer Engineer MSc, now studying education Athens, Greece
(P.S. I still have the fantasy that I will manage to apply with a second proposal as well.)
Hi, we are still welcoming mentors for this interesting proposal
On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Ιωάννης Πρωτονοτάριος < ioannis@protonotarios.eu javascript:;> wrote:
My proposal is the creation of a frontend that will help users with little or no experience at all to easily produce all the CSS needed to change
their
wiki's layout.
Full proposal wiki page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Protnet/Frontend_for_Vector_skin_CSS_cus...
The implementation proposed consists in MediaWiki extension depending on the Vector skin. The plan sounds sensible and fitting with the discssion of finding ways for 3rd party MediaWikis to differentiate from plain MediaWiki and Wikimedia sites. The proposal also shows a good amount of original thought and work.
We *might* get a secondary mentor from the WMF Design team to support the UI work and also the possibilities of CSS customization options that MediaWiki admins might be interested about. We miss a developer familiar with MediaWiki extension developer. I'm not an expert, but this extension looks relatively simple in terms of backend? It is an interface to manipulate MediaWiki:Common.css.
Ideas for related bugs that can be assigned to Ioannis as microtasks are also welcome. Just name existing bug reports requiring skills relevant to this project.
Thank you.
-- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
We *might* get a secondary mentor from the WMF Design team to support the UI work and also the possibilities of CSS customization options that MediaWiki admins might be interested about. We miss a developer familiar with MediaWiki extension developer. I'm not an expert, but this extension looks relatively simple in terms of backend? It is an interface to manipulate MediaWiki:Common.css.
I actually think (imho) it would be better implemented as a separate resource loader module rather then piggy backing on MediaWiki:Common.css. Otherwise it will get bogged down with trying to parse Common.css to figure out what the current settings are. If its a separate RL module, then the customizations are entirely separate of any junk users added to Common.css (Including syntax errors which I'm sure are common on wikis where the admins don't know css, which is the target audience). The downside of course is users can't as easily "see" the generated css to "learn" how it works under the hood, or make simple modifications to generated css.
Ideas for related bugs that can be assigned to Ioannis as microtasks are also welcome. Just name existing bug reports requiring skills relevant to this project.
Something resource loader related perhaps. Maybe 34339, although that's more backend.
On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:06:10 +0100, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
I actually think (imho) it would be better implemented as a separate resource loader module rather then piggy backing on MediaWiki:Common.css. Otherwise it will get bogged down with trying to parse Common.css to figure out what the current settings are. If its a separate RL module, then the customizations are entirely separate of any junk users added to Common.css (Including syntax errors which I'm sure are common on wikis where the admins don't know css, which is the target audience). The downside of course is users can't as easily "see" the generated css to "learn" how it works under the hood, or make simple modifications to generated css.
IIRC Ioannis actually proposed storing the data as JSON or XML in some page and generating the CSS on-demand from it.
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