A few people on rationalwiki.org have been muttering about doing a customised Vector skin.
The trouble with Vector is that, as I understand it, it's an odd melange of extension and skin, with functionality that should be in one being in the other, both ways.
I also understand that there are plans to refactor it to be sensibly organised with the right functionality in the right place. (Though I have no idea if there is actually anyone assigned to such a task.)
Is this the case? If not, what is? What's the present and future of Vector?
- d.
On 03/12/2013 05:07 PM, David Gerard wrote:
A few people on rationalwiki.org have been muttering about doing a customised Vector skin.
The trouble with Vector is that, as I understand it, it's an odd melange of extension and skin, with functionality that should be in one being in the other, both ways.
I also understand that there are plans to refactor it to be sensibly organised with the right functionality in the right place. (Though I have no idea if there is actually anyone assigned to such a task.)
Yes, people are working on eliminating the extension (removing features that didn't work and moving the good stuff to core).
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45051
It's a big task, so help would probably be welcome.
Remember, you can also do customization on-wiki at MediaWiki:Vector.js and MediaWiki:Vector.css, or through gadgets (which can be defaulted to on). Of course, if it's generally useful you may want to try to merge it into core or the extension.
Matt Flaschen
On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:07:29 +0100, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I also understand that there are plans to refactor it to be sensibly organised with the right functionality in the right place. (Though I have no idea if there is actually anyone assigned to such a task.)
Is this the case? If not, what is? What's the present and future of Vector?
There are plans, yes, and things are even starting to be getting done. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45051 . And feel free to help :)
I sort of voluntarily assigned myself to it. As in, I want it done, and probably no one will unless I get on this myself, so I started working in it. I'm mostly fighting the footer cleanup thing right now (which is still disabled by default), the rest is free to take (there is a breakdown on the bug).
My plan for the extension is to leave only the disabled features no one was using anyway in it, and just let it stay like this. It'll probably be disabled on WMF servers once all the features that are actually in use are ported.
The trouble with Vector is that, as I understand it, it's an odd melange of extension and skin, with functionality that should be in one being in the other, both ways.
Yes, but really, much worse problem is the hardcore CSS hackery used to get it to look pretty in IE6 and FF2. Cleaning this up would make it much easier to customize the skin, but I don't see a way to do it without dropping support (or at least breaking some rendering a bit), and I don't see this getting any WMF support :)
David Gerard wrote:
A few people on rationalwiki.org have been muttering about doing a customised Vector skin.
The trouble with Vector is that, as I understand it, it's an odd melange of extension and skin, with functionality that should be in one being in the other, both ways.
I also understand that there are plans to refactor it to be sensibly organised with the right functionality in the right place. (Though I have no idea if there is actually anyone assigned to such a task.)
Is this the case? If not, what is? What's the present and future of Vector?
Several people (myself included) railed against having both a skin and a MediaWiki extension named "Vector", but we were ultimately unsuccessful in avoiding the creation of the current clusterfuck.
Relevant (current) bugs:
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45051 "Phase out the Vector extension; merge the good parts into core"
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43689 "Implement "Templates used on this page" collapsing below edit window and the rest of footer cleanup module in core"
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45977 "Better, central default for MediaWiki:Edithelppage"
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42630 "Implement English Wikipedia-only enhancements for other Wikimedia wikis (tracking)"
I believe the Wikimedia Foundation would like to eventually phase-out the Vector skin in favor of the Athena skin (cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Athena).
I recently tripped across https://wikitech-test.wmflabs.org/wiki/ which is using an interesting skin, but I'm not sure which.
MZMcBride
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 6:24 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I recently tripped across https://wikitech-test.wmflabs.org/wiki/ which is using an interesting skin, but I'm not sure which.
I believe this was based off twitter's bootstrap.
-Chad
On 03/12/2013 06:24 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
I believe the Wikimedia Foundation would like to eventually phase-out the Vector skin in favor of the Athena skin (cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Athena).
Maybe, but right now there is a lot more discussion about Agora (basically, what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin/signup looks like signed out).
Where these Agora styles will eventually end up is being discussed, but currently it's in Extension:Agora (though that version of the signup page uses its own Agora styles).
Matt Flaschen
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I recently tripped across https://wikitech-test.wmflabs.org/wiki/ which is using an interesting skin, but I'm not sure which.
I spent a while getting the strapping-mediawiki skin [1] into shape for deployment on https://wiki.openstack.org. I made pull requests for my modifications, but they haven't been merged yet. I have a fork of the skin with my changes applied [2].
Bootstrap is kind of awesome to work with, I wish it was a default of MediaWiki...
- Ryan
[1]: https://github.com/OSAS/strapping-mediawiki [2]: https://github.com/ryan-lane/strapping-mediawiki
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