[Mediawiki-l] [Wikitech-l] A call for skins

[Daniel Friesen]

On 11-02-08 02:17 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Daniel Friesen
> <lists at nadir-seen-fire.com>  wrote:
>> If you have a MediaWiki skin you've built, feel free to bring out it's
>> source code. Currently most of the few custom skins that exist are
>> floating around the Internet, and they are various degrees of out of
>> date. Bring up the source code, and I'll look into committing the skin
>> into svn and cleaning it up stripping away the boilerplate.
> Have a look at userstyles.org[1]. I'm not sure what the licences are,
> but perhaps we can contact some of the authors? I'm a big fan of
> Wikipedia Grey Lady III.
>
> Btw would you mind explaining the difference between a skin and a CSS
> file, assuming there is one?
>
> Steve
> [1] For those unfamiliar with it, it's a repository of site-specific
> CSS files for use with the browser extension Stylish. You pick a style
> that someone has defined for a given site, and everytime you visit
> that site, you'll get that CSS layered over the top.
A CSS file is simply a stylesheet to style the markup, you can reference 
some images from the styles as backgrounds.
An actual skin is comprised of css files, optionally js, images, and 
most importantly a php file that is used to generate the markup.
I guess I should be clear, I'm not really looking for just stylesheets, 
or the plethora of monobook clones with minor tweaks out there.
The reason why I asked for mockups especially rather than just asking 
for skins (besides saying I'd be happy to clean them up and commit them 
to svn so that we have an actual maintained repository of the skins) was 
since what I'm especially looking for are mockups that have the areas 
necessary for a skin to function as a wiki (something blog themes are 
lacking making them hard to port as examples) but break the normal rules 
(maybe they don't use the standard sidebar, have extra links, do 
navigation differently, put categories somewhere else, etc...) of how a 
skin looks. Besides some nice extra skins to add to the repo, I need 
some examples that break the normal patterns to work with and build as I 
rip out the restrictions in the current skin system. And hence I asked 
for mockups since such skins are already hard enough that most people 
probably would never have got to implementation.

~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]