[Mediawiki-l] mediawiki 1.5: so difficult?

Mon Nov 28 23:43:46 UTC 2005

On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 16:30 +0000, Rowan Collins wrote:
> On 28/11/05, luis at cyber.law.harvard.edu <luis at cyber.law.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > Yes, but it is infrequent-by-many- i.e., I'd guess virtually everyone
> > tries to do it once, and it is an early task that forms a key first
> > impression of the quality of the software for admins. It really is
> > something that should be fixed if mediawiki wants to become more than
> > just the wiki that powers wikipedia.
> 
> Well, 2 obvious answers that somebody is bound to make:

:)

> 1) MediaWiki doesn't exactly "want" to become more than the wiki that
> powers Wikipedia - development of the core codebase is very much
> driven by the needs of the Wikimedia Foundation, and there is no
> intention among the core developers to change that emphasis.

If that is the only goal of the core developers, that's fine- their
choice, of course :) I don't follow the project closely enough to know
one way or the other- that is why I said 'if mediawiki wants'... instead
of 'dammit, mediawiki needs to do this or else you are all losers' :)

> 2) Can you clarify what you think makes the current customisation
> process difficult, and - even more usefully - can you suggest how it
> might be improved? Is it just that the existing method isn't clearly
> documented (or that the documentation itself is too hidden)? 

That's been my primary problem. I have some fairly basic needs:

* change logos to match our project's
* change default theme colors/headers/footers to match our other
webtools
* (not as immediate a need) write a full theme to match other webtools I
offer

I'd imagine these are very basic and common needs for many mediawiki
deployments but I wasn't able to find decent coherent docs on any of
these. Ironically the last point was the best documented, but that was
still fairly poor.

So... yeah. If the admin guide had those first couple points covered
(instead of choosing a default theme, which really is basically useless
to me) it would go a long way towards resolving my needs and I think the
needs of others.

Luis