453001 - No choice of skins anymore for logged-in users

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Users logged-in to MDC used to have a choice of several "skins", more than one of which were IMO superior in various respects to the site default. Now there's no possible choice anymore.

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

You need to be more specific.  What don't you like about the current skin?  I don't know what problems you have with it, so even if Deki supported multiple skins (it doesn't), I wouldn't know what to do for you anyway.

Also, support for multiple skins was not an intended feature of MDC when on MediaWiki.  It was there, so people could do it, but it was not something we encouraged.

Comment 2

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

What I most dislike is the absence of choice, especially where we had the choice before. One of the things I like best in Firefox is its high level of customizability thanks of its many first- and third-party extensions and themes, as fount at AMO and elsewhere. Why take away the users' former freedom to customize the site's look and feel?

Compared to my former favourite skin, which can still be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=cologneblue , this new site design looks to me needlessly flashy (background image etc.), less readable (due to the choice of some "fancy" font), the links and tools there are, are in the top centimeter where they disappear as soon as I scroll the page, instead of being in a handy sidebar which I can decide to make "float", i.e., placed relative to my browser display, not to the rest of the page, which means they are always in sight... Maybe I haven't listed everything.

Comment 3

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Another advantage is that the difference between my favourite skin and the site default skin used to make it obvious to me whether I was logged-in.

Comment 4

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Hm. According to http://wiki.mindtouch.com/User_Manual#Change_your_styles , there are quite a number of skins available, but IIUC the choice is made sitewise by an admin, and no user can display the pages he views when logged-in any differently (except of course by handcoding the whole CSS in userContent.css or, for non-Mozilla browsers, in the equivalent custom style sheet if any).

:-(

Comment 5

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

With other software (including wikis), skins have been the source of bugs in the past (including security bugs), so supporting that "user freedom" is by no means free.  I don't think that we should expend energy on adding multi-skin support to Deki, and recommend that the very few users who will want non-default display collaborate on greasemonkey or userContent snippets.

Comment 6

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

userContent.css ... hm, maybe, though for anything a little bit involved... well, I suppose the "Mozilla-proprietary" @-moz-document rule might come to help. I still think that having a number of "alternate stylesheets" on the site itself might be better (also from the security viewpoint), but I suppose the necessary manpower might be little cost-effective for this kind of site. (I still think that an alternate "less fancy" stylesheet might get the favour of a significant number of Moz developers, and I suppose you think the opposite; of course there's no way to "provably" settle the matter one way or another with no alternate stylesheet available.)

Greasemonkey: I'm running SeaMonkey 2.0a1pre, and Greasemonkey is supposed to be incompatible. I'm not sure how to convert a Greasemonkey script to a userChrome.js script for use with MR Tech Toolkit (I tried for the Bugzilla keywords widget-killing script and had no result).