Separating skins from core MediaWiki/Progress

From mediawiki.org

I (User:Matma Rex) am going to try keeping some kind of a progress log for the Separating skins from core MediaWiki project here.

Community bonding period[edit]

I was already an active community member, so I focused on getting a hang on the skinning landscape (existing skins and their creators).

My goals for the first half of the internship are still the same as in the original proposal: defining the recommended way of structuring skins, improving their installation process and allowing third-party skins the same degree of freedoms core skins have.

As outlined in my proposal, I am using the wikitech-l mailing list for important discussions and major milestones, and IRC for day-to-day communication.

2014-05-20[edit]

2014-05-22[edit]

  • Reviewed changes to core and VectorBeta extension that aim to solve an incompatibility for custom skins using LESS stylesheets [4] [5]

2014-05-24[edit]

2014-05-25[edit]

  • Cleaned up the category tree of Category:Skinning a bit, fixing skin documentation pages and renaming several categories
  • Started the work on deprecating skin autodiscovery, tracked on bug 65748.

2014-05-26[edit]

2014-05-27[edit]

  • https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/118345/ "Move Modern and CologneBlue out of core" and related patches were merged by Chad. I was planning to do this in the second half of the project, but it might as well be done now.

2014-05-28[edit]

  • Fixed some minor issues with the merged patches related to the above, got poked myself and poked Chad about getting it deployed on Wikimedia wikis (tracked on bug 65868).

2014-05-29[edit]

  • Modern and CologneBlue moved out of core and deployed on testwiki: everything seems to work. As I was not planning to spend time on this right now, it might delay my schedule a little, but in the worst case I'll be able to regain the lost time in the second half of the project (which has just been partially done thanks to Chad's help).
  • "Officially deprecate skin autodiscovery" merged into REL1_23.

2014-05-31[edit]

2014-06-01[edit]

2014-06-02[edit]

2014-06-03[edit]

2014-06-04[edit]

2014-06-09[edit]

2014-06-10[edit]

  • Skin autodiscovery deprecation patches were merged, and then one was reverted again because of WMF CI issues (bug 66429).
  • Added support for enabling skins in MediaWiki installer, pending review: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/138652

2014-06-11[edit]

2014-06-15[edit]

  • Skin autodiscovery is deprecated in master again (bug 66429).

2014-06-20[edit]

2014-06-21[edit]

2014-06-23[edit]

2014-06-26[edit]

2014-06-29[edit]

2014-07-01[edit]

2014-07-02[edit]

2014-07-03[edit]

  • Updated information about skin structure on Manual:Skinning Part 1 , hopefully for the last time.
  • Updated the same page about new localisation messages format introduced in MediaWiki 1.23.

2014-07-07[edit]

  • Responded to code review.
  • Updated Manual:Skinning Part 1 's information about ResourceLoader modules.
  • Updated project page with thus newly (finally!) completed documentation items.

2014-07-09[edit]

2014-07-12[edit]

2014-07-15[edit]

  • Responded to code review.
  • Reviewed and submitted some changes cleaning up references to Vector in mediawiki.ui [13] [14].

2014-07-18[edit]

  • Completed the example skin [15].
  • Updated the skinning guide in some places that didn't work well in practice.

2014-07-20[edit]

2014-07-21[edit]

2014-07-22[edit]

2014-07-23[edit]

  • Submitted a ton of fixes for tests which would fail when the default skin was changed [16].
  • Submitted a minor tweak to Minerva skin. [17]

2014-07-26[edit]

2014-07-27[edit]

2014-07-28[edit]

2014-07-30[edit]

2014-08-04[edit]

2014-08-06[edit]

2014-08-07[edit]

2014-08-08[edit]

  • Responded to more comments on Wikitech, updated more documentation.

2014-08-09[edit]

2014-08-13[edit]