Shahyar, Juliusz, Trevor, Kaldari, Roan and I sat down yesterday and talked about the future of skins. Hopefully this mail summarises what we talked about and what we agreed on. Feel free to add anything, or ask any questions in the likely event that I've misinterpreted something we talked about or this is unclear :) Specifically we talked about how we are unhappy with how difficult it currently is for developers to create a skin. The skin class involves too many functions and does more than a skin should do e.g. manage classes on the body, worry about script tags and style tags. Trevor is going to create a base set of widgets, for example a list generator to generate things like a list of links to user tools. The widgets will be agnostic to how they are rendered - some may use templates, some may not. We identified the new skin system will have two long term goals: 1) We would like to get to the point where a new skin can be built by simply copying and pasting a master template and writing a new css file. 2) Should be possible for us in future to re-render an entire page via JavaScript and using the modern history push state re-render any page via the API. (Whether we'd want to do this is another consideration but we would like to have an architecture that is powerful enough to support such a thing) As next steps we agreed to do the following: 1) Trevor is going to build a watch star widget on client and server. We identified that the existing watch star code is poorly written and has resulted in MobileFrontend rewriting it. We decided to target this as it is a simple enough example that it doesn't need a template. It's small and contained enough that we hope this will allow us to share ideas and codify a lot of those. Trevor is hoping to begin working on this the week of the 2nd September. 2) We need a templating system in core. Trevor is going to do some research on server side templating systems. We hope that the templating RFC [1] can get resolved however we are getting to a point that we need one as soon as possible and do not want to be blocked by the outcome of this RFC, especially given a mustache based templating language can address all our current requirements. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Someone in one of our meetings mentioned that Twig is a PHP implementation of Mustache. This doesn't seem to be the case though. We need a templating solution that works both on the server and the client. On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: wrote: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library

I've finished the SVGs-to-font and font-to-SVGs scripts. I'll document and post these in the next couple days.

At this point about everyone needs templating library as soon as possible and do not want to get blocked by the RFC.

At this point about everyone needs templating library as soon as possible and do not want to get blocked by the RFC. Please, let's all work together to complete the RFC for the benefit of everyone. -Niklas

Sure, we are still keen to see the RFC resolved, we just worry that it is not progressing at the speed we would like. It's not a case of ignoring

but a case of not letting ourselves be blocked on it whilst we have momentum. I was merely stating that we are not afraid of continuing down the

based templating route, if we get to the point we need to use templates for skins, since it is already available, has passed security review and performance review and can easily be swapped out for another language if necessary. We are not scared of the RFC resolving to decide on using another

language. Having to batch convert templates from one template language to whatever language we standardise on can be done via a script if the resulting template language is not Mustache based. Both Flow and MobileFrontend are heavily using Mustache based templates

we would have to write such a script anyway. I just wanted to be open about this. On 4 Sep 2014 02:50, "Matthew Flaschen" <mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l