On 10-12-02 04:52 PM, Platonides wrote: > Aryeh Gregor wrote: > >> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Paul Houle<[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Of all the code I've seen, the Mediawiki code seems to be one of >>> the most difficult code bases to make simple changes in. When I had to >>> change the template of a mediawiki once, the easiest answer I found was >>> to put a proxy server in front of it, drop out the original template >>> and spit the body text into a new template. (That said, this was a >>> system I already had on the shelf that worked wonders for all sorts of >>> commercial crapware) >>> >> What do you mean by "change the template of a mediawiki"? Do you mean >> templates in the MediaWiki sense, as in pages that can be transcluded >> into other pages? Or do you mean the skin? Skin HTML can usually be >> changed by just grepping a relevant class or id and editing some raw >> HTML, or a pretty simple wrapper layer. It can't be changed without >> hacking the code, so it's certainly a lot harder than in most popular >> web apps, but I'm pretty sure you can do it more easily in almost all >> cases than by postprocessing the HTML output. >> > Seems a Usability failure at developer users level. > The proxying solution is completely wrong, yet WMF did it, too. > And looking at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning it isn't > friendly unless you already know what's it about. >
I was experimenting with an extension to make creating php-less skins possible myself. http://pastie.org/1343349 <- here's Monobook ported to a template The biggest thing I see different from WordPress etc... is that there's a minimal amount of boilerplate in them. You don't have to copy the bottom boilerplate, there's no [dataAfterContent], you don't have things like our personal_urls where you have to code the whole tag manually calling to things to make tooltips, etc... and embedding code. The way the TOOLBOX has a bunch of stuff hardcoded into the skin isn't good. And IMHO those footerlinks should be part of MediaWiki instead of hardcoded into the skin. I wanted to make them part of the code, using an array in vector's style, making monobook use it, but fold it onto one line. Unfortunately I was stopped when I noticed that Vector moved tagline from the end, to the end of the first array, after copyright meaning they couldn't use the same array to get the same result. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
