Talk:A modern, scalable and attractive skin for MediaWiki

General comments
Hi, thanks for your proposal! Nice to see this problem now has some attention. Some things. --Nemo 08:08, 18 March 2014 (UTC) P.s.: First candidate from outside far East!
 * Throughout the proposal, it's not clear what things are going to happen in core and what in the skin itself/an extension. Please clarify body and title. For instance, if the focus is having a skin for/like wikiHow, I'd expect this to end up at wikiHow skin revamp or similar (much shorter).
 * Based on the clarifications above, I think the schedule needs some overhaul. It's not currently clear where the bulk of the work is going etc. I think you can't just let code review surface where things are need most work, leaving all such hard things to an afterthought/after-the-fact patching. I'd like you/us to use past skinning experience to identify the pain points beforehand.
 * How was wikiHow's skin chosen? Is wikiHow interested in using this new version? Is the skin representative of most of the issues most skins have, or how do you know that implementing this one skin will benefit others too? It would be nice for you to contact the authors of most important skins so that they can comment here.
 * With "works on the latest stable version of MediaWiki", do you mean 1.22 or which releases specifically?
 * Absolutely avoid this: "GitHub or Gitorious will be used as a backup". If the unlikely event of the repo being late, bully someone at San Francisco, get the gerrit admins' phone and call them, blackmail the goddess of git, whatever, but don't work on GitHub. We've seen very poor results from GSoC students who did so.
 * Thanks for mentioning i18n. How did you estimate that point, how big a pain point is it for custom skins in the wild? You only mention adding i18n support to one skin, what's your experience with MediaWiki i18n in general?


 * Hi Nemo, thanks for the comments and questions! Let me try to address the concerns you have.

I would love nothing more than to see the tools developed by wikiHow get the attention they deserve, in terms of patches and internationalization support, but right now this doesn't seem likely. Creating a fork is very easy, but keeping it in sync with "upstream" (in this case, wikiHow) changes is not, and that's the biggest issue with forking wikiHow's creations. Finally, you may find the file  in the wikiHow source code root directory interesting. (It's a file which gets included from LocalSettings.php) There's a section titled "English-specific extensions" in there; this is something I hope we wouldn't have to see in 2014, given that MediaWiki has had exceptional internationalization and localization support for many, many years. Yet it's reality.
 * The title is somewhat intentionally long and descriptive; it is also site-agnostic, describing the feature rather than its origin. I plan on forking the wikiHow skin and developing it further instead of "just" cleaning it up (which, mind you, would already be quite a task). Focusing too much on the origin of the code has the potential to unnecessarily confuse people; that's why BlueSky's default color scheme (theme) won't be the "wikiHow green" currently in use on wikiHow.com &mdash; the project does not aim to create even further brand confusion.
 * I confess that I'm not the best person when it comes to scheduling things and seems that you're the first one who's spotted that. :-) Only time will tell how much time is necessary, but I think the initial schedule described here has enough of air in it to account for any and all unexpected things and delays.
 * wikiHow's skin is available under a free and open source license (GPLv2, as is most of MediaWiki's codebase and most third-party extensions and skins) and it incorporates elements of modern design, while still supporting even legacy browsers in an acceptable manner. The skin has been praised by wikiHow users, but given its interdependencies on wikiHow extensions and core patches, it's not like you can just download and install it like any other custom skin.
 * Despite my numerous attempts at discussing with wikiHow regarding collaboration with upstream and easing future upgrades, it seems that essentially nothing's changed and the statement on [//src.wikihow.com src.wikihow.com] is still true: "We are not accepting patches to the source code". Personally I view this as harmful to everyone, but especially to wikiHow &mdash; open source and more importantly, open collaboration is an opportunity, not a threat. I can understand that the engineers' time is limited and that their engineering team might not be as big as that of Wikia's or Wikimedia Foundation's, but it's still not a valid excuse in my opinion; smaller sites (such as ShoutWiki and Brickimedia) with even smaller engineering teams are able to contribute to upstream just fine because they are willing.
 * Based on my experience with MediaWiki skins, I'd say that the wikiHow skin is a rather good example of common issues that third-party skins have. Of course there are some extra hoops and whatnot in the skin file, given the complexity of the skin combined with the fact that it's used on a top 200 website.
 * The definition of important can be problematic; are we able to agree on a definition? Are only FOSS skins important, or do popular skins that aren't (yet) freely licensed qualify as important if they're used on notable websites? And so on &mdash; I think you get the point. For what it's worth, I've been discussing with Matma Rex (core developer who maintains the Cologne Blue skin) and UltrasonicNXT (Brickimedia developer, primary author of the Refreshed skin) about issues related to skinning.
 * "Latest stable version" means the branch (and thus, by extension, the latest development version is also supported).
 * What's the reason for avoiding GitHub or Gitorious? "Poor results" sounds rather vague and not really specific enough for issues to be addressed adequately. GitHub is extremely popular with various FOSS developers and organizations developing FOSS &mdash; which, in a way, is ironical, given that GitHub itself is not free and open source software. I have to say that I'm extremely fond of the ability to commit to a GitHub repository via SVN, though &mdash; but since the code isn't open, it's not like we're able to implement that for git.wikimedia.org. Gitorious is fully free and open source and it's the second most popular Git hosting service. Of course, having the code hosted on the official repository does bring an additional level of trustworthiness, at least in my opinion, but the whole issue is mostly theoretical &mdash; so far I haven't had any bigger issues with the repository creation process, although I gotta say I do miss being able to "just do it", as you were able to during the SVN era. It's much more in line with our guidelines of being bold when changing things or spotting something you think needs to be changed.
 * Internationalization is a big pain point for skins. Either skins try to reuse core messages as much as possible (which is something), or then they don't do any (extra) i18n at all (which is, obviously, very bad). While my developer portfolio doesn't go in-depth detail on what I've done with each and every extension listed there, I'm no newcomer to MediaWiki's i18n framework. Social tools, for example, either had very poor i18n support or no i18n support at all. Nowadays it's possible to use any and all social tools from SocialProfile to FanBoxes and beyond in your native language (provided that a translation exists in said language, that is).


 * Do let me know if you have any follow-up questions and I'll be happy to answer those! --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 03:08, 19 March 2014 (UTC)