User:Waldyrious/Skins

Main goals

 * Distinguish page views from page actions (separate into menus)
 * Responsive

Documentation

 * Overview of existing documentation
 * Collect all skin-related links from mediawiki.org, meta, en.wikipedia, the source code, etc.
 * Summarize each link
 * Complete the first draft of the proposed manual in the "proposed overview" section
 * Request review of the overview, for correctness. Potential people to contact for this:
 * Matma Rex restored one of the old skins (Cologne Blue) to make it conform to the modern system based on templates
 * Ryan Lane has fixed up the strapping-mediawiki skin
 * Daniel Friesen has written quite a bit about the skin system
 * Trevor Parscal was, I believe, one of the main people involved in creating Vector
 * Krinkle seems to be quite knowledgeable about how skins work, judging from some of his comments to Gerrit patches I've seen
 * Jack Phoenix (see here)
 * Liangent (suggested by Sumana)
 * T59801: Improving the skinning experience for developers (improve documentation etc.)
 * Tech Talk: The making of a MediaWiki skin (YouTube video)
 * A History of Wiki Skins
 * Separating skins from core MediaWiki
 * 2014 Google Summer of Code project by Matma Rex.
 * Made core skins (vector, monobook, etc.) work the same way as the other skins

Links

 * My CSS tweaks: notes at meta:User talk:Waldir/global.css, code at meta:User:Waldir/vector.css
 * Wouldn't it be great if mediawiki was like the CSS Zen Garden? Then skins would be only a CSS file. Why isn't this possible? Maybe when there's support for recent CSS features for layout manipulation, such as flex, grid (note: grid is still a long way to come), move-to (see also), order (browser compat)?
 * New skins system
 * Requests for comment/Redo skin framework
 * Bug 27292 - Skinning system improvement (tracking)
 * Some issues with tweaking the menus: https://gist.github.com/waldyrious/b23f3f55ee2caf04bdf0
 * Note that to support custom sub-headings in the sidebar, the loop (as implemented by the Example skin) needs to be used.
 * Wikiwand
 * Possibly useful for reordering/moving around sidebar contents: Manual:Hooks/SidebarBeforeOutput
 * https://skins.wmcloud.org
 * Has a mode for exploring existing skins, and another mode to create new skins with a live preview for each change done in HTML/CSS/JS
 * Manual:How to make a MediaWiki skin
 * https://pixel.wmcloud.org — has visual regression tests for skins. The collection of configurations (example list for desktop) could be used as a test harness for new skins (i.e. to check how they behave in different situations)