MatmaRex (Bartosz Dziewoski) recently rewrote the CologneBlue skin for
better compatibility with modern MediaWiki standards -- see
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:mediawiki/core+bra…
. In case you're interested, here's what he learned:
"The things I learned are really mostly applicable to rewriting
cologneblue again ;) (or maybe other legacy skins). One big gotcha was
documented in
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/29422/ , another was a
tiny little bug i fixed in
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/26819/ ,
last one was
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/26808/ - and I'd say
that's it. All or most of the ugly things there were probably caused by
lack of a standardised interface like the SkinTemplate, so every skin
had to reimplement basic stuff like navigation. And then we have code
duplication, and it all being reimplemented slightly differently in
SkinTemplate, and legacy skins not supporting new hooks, because nobody
cared. But that's the usual story."
Anyone else trying to rewrite old MediaWiki skins? Any lessons learned?
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation