On 09/21/2012 11:07 AM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
On 12-09-21 7:06 AM, Nick White wrote:
Hi,
I'm new to the list, and the mediawiki world. If this would be
better directed elsewhere, let me know.
I recently came across a skin for Mediawiki called Erudite[1], which
is based on a Wordpress theme of the same name[2].
I updated it to the work well with the current Mediawiki version,
fix bugs, and try and ensure everything was general enough that it
should work on any wiki with any extensions. As I say, I'm new to
mediawiki, so my ideas on the best ways of doing things come largely
from a blog post[3], the mediawiki wiki, and delving into
mediawiki's code for things I wasn't sure about. It's possible I
didn't follow best practises in some places, but I certainly tried
to.
I set up a new wiki demoing the skin (editing and creating accounts
is enabled; try it out,) here:
https://www.dur.ac.uk/nick.white/erudite-demo/mediawiki-current/
And the code is all here:
https://www.dur.ac.uk/nick.white/eruditeskin-0.9.4-r1.tar.bz2
If anybody interested could take a look, and give me feedback, that
would be wonderful.
There are a few issues. Some small ones inside the code and
the file
layout seems to have been misunderstood.
It would be good to skip the tarball and put this into a Git repo.
I added the repo to the list of new repos to be created.
Thanks for doing that, Daniel.
I'd also
ideally love the skin to be taken as one of the standard
skins that is distributed with mediawiki. I think it's very
attractive, and quite different to the other mediawiki themes I
found, so could be a good fit. Might that be possible? How would I
go about pushing that forward?
All of the skins that come with MediaWiki are
designed precisely for
MediaWiki. From the very start. This is really a WP theme shoehorned
into MW, so I wouldn't really aim to have it included.
Honestly we generally don't include any theme someone just comes up with
into core. There are plenty of themes in the past designed specifically
for MediaWiki and none of them made it into core.
Well, just because we haven't done something in the past doesn't mean
we're dead set against doing it in the future. :-) For example, we've
started bundling certain extensions with MediaWiki tarballs. The
MediaWiki release process is in flux and open to new ideas --
non-Wikimedia Foundation folks (Mark Hershberger to start) are now
creating some, as you can see on the wikitech-l and mediawiki-l lists.
So perhaps they should take a new look at what skins should be included,
or how to point MediaWiki administrators towards selected
well-maintained skins (including some that are more innovative and less
MediaWiki-centric).
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]
Good luck, Nick, and thanks for making a new skin!
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation