I've been working on a pageoutput branch. Centred around an earlier RFC.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Page_output_branch https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Drop_actions_in_favour_o...
The general goals of the project are: - Actions die off and instead we have SpecialPages that take on that functionality. &action= urls become one method of accessing certain special pages. - We have a new PageView system that replaces Article which just handles the output of a page and SpecialPage becomes an implementation of these. - Logic for things like tabs, special links in the toolbox, canonical urls, etc... become part of the PageView implementation and Skin only handles the way they are laid out instead of also doing the actual creation.
Some of this stuff is related to skinning and works better for the skinning rewrite if done before so I started on this before the template system and whatnot.
It takes a day of work to do much in this branch and I only have about 1 day in a week I can go and start coding things at that level, so the project hasn't gone all too far yet. (not to mention merging is horrible, I wasted several hours at one point I could have been coding with on merging some conflicts from trunk).