On 11-09-12 04:23 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 2:48 AM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
On 11-09-11 04:56 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
I'm curious what problem you're trying to solve. It sounds like you're trying to get people who are currently working on Wordpress skins or Drupal skins to work on MediaWiki skins instead, but to what end?
The "going back to <x>" part tacked on the end was more of a joke. I'm trying to solve the flaws in our skin system especially the ones where our skin system is deficient compared to other theme engines like WordPress' and Drupal's. But also trying to avoid repeating some of the same flaws in those skin systems. And taking our differences into consideration.
I guess I'm asking for the most important user stories, since trying to be all things to all people is almost certainly going to fail. Is the most important user (to you) an individual English Wikipedia account holder who wants to switch away from the default theme, or a MediaWiki administrator who wants to align the look-and-feel of their Wordpress blog with their MediaWiki install? Do you imagine that the person who creates the next great MediaWiki theme is someone who is a CSS expert, or more of a programmer?
The focus of improving the skin system is naturally the latter. Letting someone with a MediaWiki install and a design take the two of them and make them usable as one.
"the next great MediaWiki theme" is a non-goal. If we were going for the great skin to replace Vector which replaced MonoBook, we'd just put it in core. I'm trying to eliminate the problems in the way of people easily adopting MediaWiki and giving it their look as they can easily with other engines. That's the purpose of a skin system, just about anything else you could shove into core without an extensible skin system.
This thread spurred a small conversation in the office over lunch today. I won't speak for the group, but the conclusion I reached from that conversation was that a more achievable and immediately solvable problem to tackle would be to improve the ability to customize skins purely from CSS. That is, create a new skin that makes it really easy to move blocks of content (navigation elements, etc) around and customize their appearance. I would love to see some alignment of other theming systems with our own, so that we can potentially attract theme experts from other projects to port their existing themes to MediaWiki.
Not interested in a pure-CSS skin there's plenty of things that are impossible to do from css. There's no way we'll see a new innovative skin if it's stuck with the same kind of markup we've been using. All we'll see is more MonoBook clones like 90% of the existing MediaWiki skins are.
I only need to bring up one of the biggest problems I've noticed. Our navigation. We only support the sidebar navigation within our skin system. Any skin that uses navigation that doesn't fit within that very narrow form of navigation needs to completely re-implement message parsing or hardcode stuff. Practically every client design I've seen -- and I'm talking about real designs, for real organizations picking up MediaWiki -- has had a header navigation. BASESwiki uses one, the CCA Wiki design I'm currently turning into a skin uses one, just about every site I've seen us working on for clients has had one, and nearly every WordPress theme I've seen uses that type of navigation menu.
There's no way you can switch between sidebar navigation to header navigation in pure css.
Rob