15 Oct
2010
15 Oct
'10
10:21 p.m.
On 10/11/2010 08:49 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi all,
On Oct 10, 2010, at 11:52 PM, Sorin Burjan wrote:
We're slowly moving in this direction.
Lately, we've been developing "UI components" that are skin-independent.
This means moving code out of the huge core skin, which makes it easier
to write a new skin from scratch.
Color Themes allow us to make Colibri appear as many skins. The planned
Layout Themes will make this even simpler.
Skin Extensions allows adapting an existing skin very easily. We're not
using them for this purpose, but we could write sample extensions that:
- make the panels round
- add some backgrounds and gradients here and there
- change the fonts
- shuffle things around
Color themes + Skin extensions make it easy to develop something similar
to Firefox Personas, lightweight paint jobs over Colibri. We're not
doing this yet, but we could start a new section on code.xwiki.org,
maybe organize a contest for people to contribute entries.
+1 In time we should make Colibri, Toucan and
other skins to be
independent of each other. By doing this, they will be more easily
maintained
They should be independent but that doesn't make more maintainable,
quite the opposite since it means sharing less. Instead we need to
find ways to make skins more easily maintainable and I think this
means sharing more between skins based on the same "concepts", i.e.
having skin "variants" instead of completely new skins. Actually I
don't know what makes a skin easy to write and easy to maintain. What I see is that some webapp have lots of skins for
example
wordpress so it seems it's possible to have lots of skin. I'm still
not sure what element of our skin system makes it hard to maintain
our skins.
That's because Wordpress skins are a real mess. The equivalent of a
Wordpress skin for XWiki would mean packaging both the templates and a
skin, along with some images, and we're trying to avoid encouraging
people to duplicate the templates. Then, there's a huge difference in
terms of features that need to be styled, since Wordpress is just a
blogging tool, while XWiki is a development platform.
Splitting the skin into even more parts would certainly make writing
skins easier, but we're lacking the manpower to work full speed on this.
>> On 10/10/2010 03:21 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu
wrote:
>>> Hi devs,
>>>
>>> I'd like to propose that we don't maintain the Albatross skin
>>> anymore, since it's time consuming to port all the UI
>>> improvements and fixes to it.
>>>
>>> The skin will not be removed from the distribution yet, since
>>> it's still the base skin on which Toucan and Colibri are built,
>>> although we should try to fix this dependency in the near
>>> future.
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu/