https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57801
--- Comment #4 from Isarra <[email protected]> --- (In reply to comment #0) > Improving the skinning experience > > Research how to make the development of skins for MediaWiki easier. > Many users complain about the lack of modern skins for MediaWiki and > about having a hard time with skin development and maintenance. The lack of skin options may well have more to do with what mediawiki is than anything else - wordpress, for instance, has many available skins... and also has many, many more installs, because the common use case is personal, not community. People make more blogs than wikis. There are more individuals than communities. > Often sys admins keep old versions of MediaWiki due to incompatibility of > their skins, which introduces security issues and prevents them from using > new features. However, little effort was done to research the exact problem > points. These would probably be the many of same problem points as with extensions, which fits because skins effectively are a type of extension. Development in core rarely takes into consideration third party uses, so changes are often introduced that affect how extensions and skins need to be written... and this winds up breaking many existing ones. This seems to be particularly common with frontend-facing features, though, which might bear looking into. > The project could include improving skinning documentation This is something that definitely needs doing. There basically is no useful documentation at present. (Potential project - make some? Coding aspect could involve making a nice skin or two in the process, since that would probably be necessary to figure it all out anyway.) Currently a skinner's best bet is usually just to find an existing skin to copy. But while this is indeed very effective, it can also be problematic because to do so they need to find a skin that's well-organised and modular - and none of the skins currently shipped with core are either of these things. (Potential project - turn the core skins into default extensions and get their innards out of the rest of core? It'd certainly be nice to get that cleaned up even in general. I don't like running into bits of Vector in the middle of ResourceLoader. What.) > organizing training sprints/sessions, talking to users to identify problems, > researching skinning practices in other open source platforms and suggesting > an action plan to improve the skinning experience. Other platforms are generally not something we want to encourage people to look at, at least for this. MediaWiki's system, bat fuck though it may be, is actually very powerful in its support for hooks, internationalisation, and other such things. It also has this exceedingly wonderful feature of not tending to turn skins into an unholy soup of files. Have you tried skinning wordpress? File soup. Horrible file soup. Well, okay, I may be exaggerating slightly, but the point is, we actually do quite well already, and in this case turning to others is probably not going to help anyway. MediaWiki has a specific use case, WordPress has a very different use case, etc. These things each have a skinning system to serve its respective usage. We should be paying attention to what that usage is and then cleaning things up better according to that. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
