RfC: Making skin labs useful for people who explore skins

[alistair3149]

Please feel free to edit the list, it is a list of potential pain points that help to explore how to make skin labs more useful and desirable for people who explore skins (e.g. wiki admins, extension dev, etc.).

• As a wiki admin, I want to see a preview of a wiki page in my language, so that I can pick a skin that works with my language (Support different interface languages in preview mode #12).
• As a wiki admin, I want to see if the skin works with my MW version, so that I know the skin would run on my wiki.
• As a wiki admin, I want to see how a skin looks with my MW version, so that I know how the skin look on my wiki.
• As an extension developer, I want to see potential locations that I can add UI elements to with hook, so that I know how my extension look across different skins.

It is a rough draft that I can personally think of for now and had come across before. Looking forward to how you'all think about it!

[jdlrobson]

Looking into many of these things today

[alistair3149]

Looking into many of these things today

Please let me know if there is anything me or the community can chime in. I can't offer much in terms of development other than some styling and basic JS, but it is an awesome project that I really want it to be successful!

[jdlrobson]

As an extension developer, I want to see potential locations that I can add UI elements to with hook, so that I know how my extension look across different skins.

Regarding this one installing https://github.com/jdlrobson/mediawiki-skins-skinjson does a lot of this (via wgSkinJSONValidate) and it's enabled on the skins preview on the site. Is there anything specific functionality missing here?

[alistair3149]

Regarding this one installing https://github.com/jdlrobson/mediawiki-skins-skinjson does a lot of this (via wgSkinJSONValidate) and it's enabled on the skins preview on the site. Is there anything specific functionality missing here?

SkinJson helps skin developers seeing all the Mustache data available but it is not helpful for extension developers seeing how the extension would integrate with the skin in terms of UI. I see that there are already some work done with the Potential banner location. and SkinAfterContent boxes. Would it be possible to link those boxes directly to the manual of the hook or pages related to how to use them?

[jdlrobson]

That sounds like a great idea!

[jdlrobson]

I made a bit of progress on 2. The API at https://skins-demo.wmflabs.org//w/rest.php/v1/skins now surfaces branches which can be used to determine available MediaWiki versions.