On 2/9/10 4:07 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:56 PM,
Platonides<Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We will be glad to have you on it, Trevor.
Rewriting the skin system is
not urgent, although I would like to have a newskin compatible vector
skin before releasing 1.16. This way, we wouldn't be forced to support
an old vector design.
Since when do we support skins at all? We change them incompatibly on
every release anyway. With any luck, we could cut back on that if we
moved to a sane system, but I wouldn't block 1.16 on it. I wouldn't
hold off on committing either, though, if it can be demonstrated that
the skins' output remains byte-for-byte the same except whitespace.
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I see that there are 3 steps to achieving sanity in MediaWiki skinning.
1. Remove all skins other than Monobook and Vector.
2. Write a more ideal skinning system.
3. Port Monobook and Vector over to the new system.
Why only Monobook and Vector? 94%[1] of users on English Wikipedia are
currently using one of them. They are both built on SkinTemplate, so
porting will be a similar process. They are also different enough that
they will effectively exercise the new system.
We also need to consider that a good general template class which any
part of the MediaWiki can use for user interfaces would be a good thing
to base this skin class on. This doesn't have to use any fancy syntax,
just good old PHP in it's inline forms such as <?php if( $something ):
?>...<?php endif; ?> and <?php foreach( $things as $thing ): ?>...<?php
endforeach; ?>. I have some code I've been playing around with that
might be perfect for this.
In short, It's better to give users their choice of 3 decent skins than
10 crappy ones, and if we can make migration to the new system less
painful, it's more likely to actually happen.
- Trevor
[1] English Wikipedia Skin Preferences
monobook 49.72%
vector 44.16%
modern 2.73%
cologneblue 1.38%
standard 0.73%
chick 0.44%
nostalgia 0.31%
myskin 0.28%
simple 0.24%
amethyst 0.00%