[Wikia-l] A new way to style skins

Sat Mar 1 13:59:17 UTC 2008

Yes, the idea was a type of MediaWiki message, but it wasn't only for 
dark skins, it was for mod tags basically:

Say you had the dark skins Quartz (Custom and Gaming), Monobook, and 
Monaco (Custom). And you also wanted to tag skins which use the 
#p-actions so you can add stuff for tabmenus in skins that have those 
tabs, without causing possible cruft in other skins. Then in 
[[MediaWiki:Skin-mods]] you'd put something like:
* monobook: dark tabmenu
* quartz-custom: dark
* quartz-gaming: dark
* monaco-custom: dark
Then when in MonoBook mod-dark and mod-tabmenu would be in the body tag. 
And when in quartz gaming or custom, and in monaco-custom mod-dark would 
be in the body tag. Then you can do stuff inside of Common.css to 
support proper styles in the content area when a skin has a dark content 
area. (Especially important when wiki like the ACG wiki are sharing 
content styles).

It doesn't really have to parse it on every page load, even the sidebar 
isn't like that... Just parse it once for a wiki, turn it into an 
associative array (skinname as key, the value is a numeric array 
containing a list of the mod tags for that skin), save that inside of 
Memcached with a fair expiry, and when [[MediaWiki:Skin-mods]] is saved 
or purged, delete the cache and it'll be recached with a proper value on 
the next page serve. And after that you just get that array from 
memcached, use the skinname to get the array of mod tags 
($skinMods[$skinname]) and do some sort of loop, array_map(); or 
array_walk(); to prepend mod- to each of them and implode(); it into the 
body tags. Afaik I think this can also all be done merely as an 
extension without modifying the source of any of the skins.

~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of:
-The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com)
-Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG)
-and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)

Christian Williams wrote:
> Sorry, big ups to Dantman also for suggesting this. I'm forgetful. :)
>
> The skins with dark backgrounds one probably isn't as easy, because a 
> dark background could be created in MediaWiki:Monaco.css and I 
> wouldn't know about it while rendering the body tag. The php that 
> renders the skin would have to either check a preference that is set 
> to "this has a dark background, set 'skin-dark' in the body tag" or 
> would have to parse a mediawiki article on each load to pull in any 
> custom classes. Anyway, the addition of wikiaSkinMonaco, etc was a 2 
> minute job that hopefully moves customization options in the right 
> direction.
>
> -Christian
>
> On Feb 28, 2008, at 4:11 PM, DanTMan wrote:
>
>> T_T I'm invisible aren't I? Either that or really easy to not notice...
>>
>> Ages ago I suggested body tags... Cept in the form:
>> skin-name and theme-name as well as an idea for mod-* tags to deal 
>> with things like skins with dark backgrounds.
>> ((Still think skin-monobook, skin-quartz, skin-monaco, theme-custom, 
>> theme-brick, etc... would be better. Especially since it keeps in 
>> line with the standard naming of other body tags...))
>> ~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of:
>> -The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com)
>> -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG)
>> -and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)
>> Christian Williams wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> The <body> tag of Monobook, Quartz, and Monaco have an additional css
>>> class this morning. You can use the "wikiaSkinMonobook",
>>> "wikiaSkinQuartz", and "wikiaSkinMonaco" classes to target specific
>>> skins while writing styles in MediaWiki:Common.css.
>>>
>>> The additional CSS class in the body tag was suggested to me by Pan
>>> Sola for making minor margin tweaks to the various skins, independent
>>> of what skin was set as default. Please remember that Common.css is
>>> loaded for every skin, every time. In customizing a theme for your
>>> wiki, it's still best to choose one of the Custom options in the skin
>>> chooser and use MediaWiki:Quartz.css or MediaWiki:Monaco.css to
>>> specify the styles.
>>>
>>> -Christian
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikia-l mailing list
>>> Wikia-l at wikia.com
>>> http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
>>>
>>>
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