I'm put in charge of a private wiki for a university here. I've been told to bring back the old UI, as apparently for the dean, "The new interface is too hard and fancy!". My job's on the line here. Can anyone tell me how the hell do I go back to mw-ui? I tried commenting all the dependencies in Resources.PHP and commented out OOjs style from ResourceLoader.PHP. Yet, I could not get a few forms like in the special:movepage to prevent generating the OOjs classes. Please tell me there is a way!
Topic on Talk:OOUI
I'm sorry; I don't know how to solve the technical problem. I can't even tell you whether it's possible.
On the human side, have you talked to the dean yourself about this? In my experience, these messages are not always accurately relayed, so if you think you're getting the message second- or third-hand, then it might be worth double-checking. Also, people's initial reaction often changes after they've used something a few more times. And, of course, it's possible that the dean has discovered a bug. In that case, I'd be happy to help you file a bug report.
Yeah, I did. The university got used to the regular UI. They were using an old MediaWiki 1.21. I updated it on their request, fixed all the breaking changes. Now I'm tasked with removing the OOjs library or the UI elements for the least. So far, I have successfully stopped the OOjs core styles from loading up via resource loader. But most things like movepage and search are still using the OOjs UI elements. I see they are defined in that way. Is there a way to go back to mediawiki ui?
I'm afraid there's no easy way to keep a latest version of MediaWiki but without the OOUI design; moving all of MediaWiki to it has been a key part of the (still incomplete) marathon job of modernising all the interfaces. Depending on which skin you're using, the "Apex theme" (which loads for Monobook) might be more appealing to the design sensibilities of your users, but other than that I can only recommend reverting which version of MediaWIki you're using.
I also noticed that due to this incomplete transition, some parts of MediaWiki is slow as well. I have submitted a request to revert back to the older version. The problem is I have to patch all the security updates manually. I literally fainted imagining that!
I guess the OOjs UI widgets will mostly work fine if you remove (or heavily trim down) the styles. This is not supported and you will probably face all kinds of problems with tools which depend on OOjs UI more heavily (e.g. UploadWizard or VisualEditor), but if you're desperate… The style files are in /resources/lib/oojs-ui (see also Do not hack MediaWiki core).
Implementing an "unstyled" OOjs UI theme could probably be kind of cool, though. Maybe we should do that at some point.
Also, like James suggested, try using the Apex theme instead – it's a lot less "modern-looking" (but still different from the old lack of styling). If you want it for Vector, you'll need to hack skins/Vector/skin.json and add the following at the end before "manifest_version": 1 (please note, the same warnings about hacking core apply here, but this is likely to cause a lot less problems):
"SkinOOUIThemes": {
"vector": "Apex"
},