User:DanielRenfro/Ae

These are Daniel's notes on creating "Æ", a new skin for MediaWiki. You can find the current source-code at: http://github.com/bluecurio/mediawiki-skin-ae

Goals / rationale
First off, go read the Athena article; I'll wait. This project is very much in-line with that of Athena. The idea of having a mobile-oriented skin for MediaWiki was realized by multiple people around the same time. It came to Daniel whilst he was busy moving jobs and he never got around to actually creating anything. In that time, Jorm and others started the Athena and Glaucus projects, which address many of the same issues (in a much better and more organized way.) You should go read the Goals sections of those projects — this project shares those goals directly.

In short, we want something responsive and modern that puts usability first and addresses the fact that mobile-devices are the way of the future. (It should also use lots of technologies that have current buzzwords and look shiny.)

Current projects

 * Athena — a 2+ year old initiative to create a skin for MW, by User:Jorm and others
 * Glaucus — the first step towards Athena
 * Matthew Batchelder's
 * mtyeh411's

Other reading

 * Manual:Skinning, and Manual:Skinning/Tutorial
 * User:Dantman/Skinning_system

Plans

 * Create a proof-of-concept responsive skin that gives 75% of the functionality.
 * Test this out on everything you can get your hands on

Things on the page
This is a non-exhaustive list of things on the current (Vector) page. This list in no way addresses a solution or the fact that site-actions and content-actions are all mixed together.


 * logo
 * the sidebar in general
 * top-level navigation links (main-page, recent changes, random page, etc.)
 * customizable content
 * toolbox (what links here, logs, special-pages, user contributions, ...)
 * page/article actions (edit, talk, history, move/rename, delete, watch, ...)
 * search box
 * search suggestions
 * user-related stuff ("My" things: my preferences, my contributes, my ...)
 * icons at the bottom of the page (powered by mw, license, html5, ...)
 * various links to privacy policy, diclaimers, about, ...
 * article metadata
 * last-edited info
 * user language, UniversalLanguageSelector, ...
 * user notifications
 * other types of notifications (site-notice, undelete notice, ...)
 * current time (currently extreme top right)
 * list of categories
 * title, subtitle (redirect info, subpages, ...)
 * table of contents
 * lists of various kinds (subcategories/files/pages on category pages)
 * diffs
 * history
 * edit box
 * edit-tools (when we please get rid of this?! People, please use the VisualEditor )
 * templates used on this page
 * Dear God, special pages...

Other styling considerations

 * link styling of various kinds for stubs
 * different media types (like printable media, for example)

Don't forget about

 * User preferences that affect the view (everything in the Appearance section on Special:Preferences