[Mediawiki-l] how long to make a good MW skin?

[Clayton]

Christensen, Courtney wrote:
> Hi WikiMedians,
> 
> This question is for any of you who have developed a skin.  I imagine you are constantly tweaking your skins, but how long does it take you to make a workable one?  I recently had to make a skin from some images made by a graphic design shop.  I made it look great, just like the pictures, but I forgot a lot of the functional things, like the table padding my users were used to or the new class on links to non-existent pages.  I'm thinking skin development is a thankless job that requires attention to detail and more stamina and persistence than I seem to have.
> 
> So give me a yardstick.  How long does it take to develop a well-rounded skin on average?

We developed a custom skin for the openOffice.org Wiki
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/  I don't know if you would
call this a well rounded skin though... it's based very much on the
MonoBook skin (ie not redesigned from scratch).

It didn't really take that terribly long to tweak it into shape.  The
skin was created primarily through the efforts of three people in the
Ooo Community, and went through three stages.

The first stage was simply tinkering with ideas to see if we could do
what we wanted.

The second stage was going live with a rough version of the skin using
most of the existing MonoBook CSS layout plus tweaks for colors spacing
etc.  The tabs on the upper right were rectangular and poorly spaced,
and we had other minor issues here and there.

The third stage (where we are now) was a cleanup of the rough edges so
to speak.. some tweaking to bring the style in line with the parent
www.openoffice.org website, and fixes on things like the rounding tabs
at the top right, adding the "nice touches" like the faint seagulls in
the blocks in the left nav bar, changing and adding icons, etc.

I couldn't pin down a specific number of hours to produce this skin,
but... it wasn't weeks of effort... a few days at most.

C.
-- 
Clayton Cornell       ccornell at openoffice.org
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany