* Siebrand Mazeland s.mazeland@xs4all.nl [Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:04:56 +0100]:
If this is merged after the 1.16 branching, and support for old skins would be dropped from 1.17 on, you'll be able to use the old skinning system up to EOL of 1.16 as a supported version, expected somewhere around March 2011 or a few months later. Should give you ample time to prepare for MediaWiki 1.18 or whatever is the current version then...
If I understand correctly, current js2-work branch will be a base for 1.17? Is there any way to make old MonoBook derived skins to be compatible with js2 code? I have lots of them. Actually, since long time skin implementation code was fast but has very non-modular structure with no clear data and visualization separation, no structurized methods for sidebar, tooltips and so on. Templating was done in the far past (CBT) but that probably was considered not efficient enough for heavy load sites. For the efficiency, it should be possible to write a skin generator, where the nice templatable format of skin will be converted to efficient but spaghetti-like PHP code. Also, incremental CSS changes can be made automatically then. I wonder how should I prepare my monobook-derived skins to make them easier to upgrade someday. Dmitriy