Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it: * Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend * Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF * Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does * Bundle it with MW by default
---- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi?useskin=minerva
On Fri Feb 13 2015 at 2:15:29 PM Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
Here here!
-Chad
On 13 February 2015 at 17:19, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri Feb 13 2015 at 2:15:29 PM Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we
just
do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
Here here!
Help me out here. Why does anyone care that the article was last edited 13 days ago by Omeganian? And even if they do, why is that the very first thing that someone sees?
Risker/Anne
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Help me out here. Why does anyone care that the article was last edited 13 days ago by Omeganian? And even if they do, why is that the very first thing that someone sees?
See the part about improvements.
On 13 February 2015 at 17:25, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Help me out here. Why does anyone care that the article was last edited
13
days ago by Omeganian? And even if they do, why is that the very first thing that someone sees?
See the part about improvements.
Well, see. It seems to me that the old-time theory of "let's just stick it up and fix it when we get around to it" has pretty much been deprecated in the last couple of years.
Risker/Anne
We really need to just evolve Vector. It's not a sacred cow, and it's sort of sad how little it's been changed since I made in back in 2009. How it looks, how it works and how it responds to different devices can all be changed incrementally, and we can do this without continued or additional fragmentation.
I appreciate that the mobile skin (Minerva) forged ahead, but it did this by ignoring certain problems that the desktop skin has to solve for. Now that we've learned some things about supporting mobile, we should be integrating that work back into our primary and existing user interface, effectively merging them back together.
- Trevor
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 13 February 2015 at 17:25, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Help me out here. Why does anyone care that the article was last edited
13
days ago by Omeganian? And even if they do, why is that the very first thing that someone sees?
See the part about improvements.
Well, see. It seems to me that the old-time theory of "let's just stick it up and fix it when we get around to it" has pretty much been deprecated in the last couple of years.
Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Trevor Parscal wrote:
We really need to just evolve Vector. It's not a sacred cow, and it's sort of sad how little it's been changed since I made in back in 2009. How it looks, how it works and how it responds to different devices can all be changed incrementally, and we can do this without continued or additional fragmentation.
Agreed, kind of.
I'm all for iterative improvements, but the trickiness here comes from Vector's identity as a skin. Skins, in my mind, are substantively about appearance. If we wanted to remove all the gradients from Vector, is it still Vector? What if we kill the sidebar? At what point does choosing Vector really mean not being able to choose anything because Vector is always evolving. That is, there's some sense in a stable skin choice.
Prateek is quite interested in making a new skin and I offered to help. My suggestion was to start with Vector as a base and slowly create a new skin from there. This way we can learn from and directly incorporate lessons learned in the development of Monobook and Vector, but we retain the flexibility to make larger (perhaps even "breaking") changes to the new skin, as we slowly expand the skin's usage and learn more about what people want and need in 2015 that perhaps wasn't possible or wasn't considered a priority in 2009. I'm hopeful that careful, incremental development using Vector as a base is the correct path forward.
So now we have Blueprint, Apex, Slate, and Minerva, I suppose.
MZMcBride
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:11 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Trevor Parscal wrote:
We really need to just evolve Vector. It's not a sacred cow, and it's sort of sad how little it's been changed since I made in back in 2009. How it looks, how it works and how it responds to different devices can all be changed incrementally, and we can do this without continued or additional fragmentation.
Agreed, kind of.
I'm all for iterative improvements, but the trickiness here comes from Vector's identity as a skin. Skins, in my mind, are substantively about appearance. If we wanted to remove all the gradients from Vector, is it still Vector? What if we kill the sidebar? At what point does choosing Vector really mean not being able to choose anything because Vector is always evolving. That is, there's some sense in a stable skin choice.
Prateek is quite interested in making a new skin and I offered to help. My suggestion was to start with Vector as a base and slowly create a new skin from there. This way we can learn from and directly incorporate lessons learned in the development of Monobook and Vector, but we retain the flexibility to make larger (perhaps even "breaking") changes to the new skin, as we slowly expand the skin's usage and learn more about what people want and need in 2015 that perhaps wasn't possible or wasn't considered a priority in 2009. I'm hopeful that careful, incremental development using Vector as a base is the correct path forward.
So now we have Blueprint, Apex, Slate, and Minerva, I suppose.
MZMcBride
Links for the curious: Blueprint = https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Living_style_guide Apex = https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Apex Slate = https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Slate Minerva = https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Minerva
(Tangentially, it might be useful to keep https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T53912 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T62317 in mind)
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Help me out here. Why does anyone care that the article was last edited 13 days ago by Omeganian? And even if they do, why is that the very first thing that someone sees?
This is rather off-topic, but to answer the question it was part of a series of design experiments on mobile called Humanizing Wikipedia. The idea was to make the presence of editors and editing more prominent to see if this encourage more readers to try editing. It's largely a moot issue as the UI element is in the process of being moved back to the bottom of the article (as it has been already in the beta mode on MediaWiki 1.25wmf17). Anyway, I don't want to derail the discussion. Just wanted to try to answer your question.
Kaldari
On 2015-02-13 2:19 PM, Chad wrote:
On Fri Feb 13 2015 at 2:15:29 PM Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
Here here!
-Chad
I won't object to turning Minerva into an alternate desktop skin.
However you can go the other way. Applying a desktop design, turning it into a responsive theme. Or slightly re-designing it so it works as both.
I've done plenty of responsive MediaWiki themes before at work.
One of them live at: http://wiki.cancer.org.au/australia/Guidelines
Besides adding functionality to Minerva equivalent to a desktop theme. Minerva will probably need more design/style to it to avoid looking to sparse/bland on a huge desktop.
The only 'real' problem with making Vector mobile is probably our ancient and unfriendly sidebar interface.
I would suggest a hybrid job. Take Minerva's functionality (ditching the sidebar, tabs, etc...) but use Vector's design elements, combine them into a new responsive theme that visually feels like Vector but functionally works like and is responsive like Minerva.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
On 02/13/2015 02:14 PM, Max Semenik wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T71366
-- Legoktm
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Note that my proposal is explicitly different from Jon's plans about that bug: he wants to continue overriding special pages, etc. while I want to leave everything like this outside of the skin, including its custom JS-based wikitext editor.
On 14/02/15 09:39, Max Semenik wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Note that my proposal is explicitly different from Jon's plans about that bug: he wants to continue overriding special pages, etc. while I want to leave everything like this outside of the skin, including its custom JS-based wikitext editor.
So how would this work exactly? Would Minvera's navigation drawer be refactored so that it uses Skin::buildSidebar(), SkinTemplate::buildContentNavigationUrls(), etc.? And how would MF reapply its special page replacement? Hooks into those same common functions? Would it be possible to get the mobile special pages on a non-minerva skin?
I suppose the OutputPage::setTarget() call would also be left in MF.
-- Tim Starling
Yup!
On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 14/02/15 09:39, Max Semenik wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Note that my proposal is explicitly different from Jon's plans about that bug: he wants to continue overriding special pages, etc. while I want to leave everything like this outside of the skin, including its custom JS-based wikitext editor.
So how would this work exactly? Would Minvera's navigation drawer be refactored so that it uses Skin::buildSidebar(), SkinTemplate::buildContentNavigationUrls(), etc.? And how would MF reapply its special page replacement? Hooks into those same common functions? Would it be possible to get the mobile special pages on a non-minerva skin?
I suppose the OutputPage::setTarget() call would also be left in MF.
-- Tim Starling
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Feb 13, 2015 6:15 PM, "Max Semenik" maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi?useskin=minerva
-- Best regards, Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]]) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Seems reasonable (particullarly in a "perfect" is the enemy of "good" way). But can we keep vector as default please (or at least until there has been a couple releases with minivera as an option so we can evaluate if people are switching to it and its meeting peoples needs as a desktop skin).
--bawolff
Can I just say that I hate it? It does not even give access to the talk page!
Il 13/02/2015 23:14, Max Semenik ha scritto:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi?useskin=minerva
On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 2:42 PM, Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org wrote:
Can I just say that I hate it? It does not even give access to the talk page!
Looks like here is the best place to discuss design decisions: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Beta_Features/Minerva
Thanks, MaxSem. I'm looking forward to a skin which only does skinning.
Specific hacks/overrides are indeed best discussed elsewhere, but the "last edited [by X] Y ago" is actually a good example. The change was tested on desktop and a decision was made to make it permanent. Instead, it ended up being applied on MobileFrontend only, morphed into something different and died there. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Timestamp_position_modification
Nemo
P.s.: Speaking of ways to achieve concrete results in the immediate future, see the community discussion I just opened, "Proposal: restore normal editing permissions on all mobile sites". https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Forum&oldid=11276...
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 23:14:59 +0100, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
Yes please. Let's do it.
On 15/02/15 21:03, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 23:14:59 +0100, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for all the trolling, but why instead of discussing how we need a responsive skin for MediaWiki and waiting for Winter to come don't we just do it:
- Move Minerva out of MobileFrontend
- Leave all mobile-specific improvements, "improvements" and hacks in MF
- Polish Minerva to do everythig a normal desktop skin does
- Bundle it with MW by default
Yes please. Let's do it.
Yup. It needs improvements and polishing, but this would be great to have.
The thing McBride brings up with a new fork of vector is another thing worth working on, but in general making new skins as skins is something we should be doing more of, not just changing the look of existing ones (which, as he says, kind of defeats the purpose of a skin in the first place). This one's almost there already and it would be nice to embrace it in full.
-I
On 2015-02-16 5:07 PM, Isarra Yos wrote:
but in general making new skins as skins is something we should be doing more of
I remember a time way back when we were still using QuickTemplate.
I spent some time eliminating Vector hacks and creating core features like content_navigation that made Vector improvements available to all new skins.
...
Now Vector has almost as many hacks as it used to yet again.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org