DakarRelease will ship with two skins, Pattern and Classic. Pattern will be enabled by default. Is this really good enough?

Thesis the standard TWikiFor should ship with two skins, but they are not Pattern and Classic.

Classic skin has a few problems:

1. It is quite complex, and is not that easy to maintain
2. It is ugly (to CC anyway)
3. It is not internationalised
4. It is rotting, as it has failed to leverage new approaches

Pattern skin also has a few problems

1. It knackers performance
2. It is very complex, and difficult to get your head round
3. It has no "themes"

There is room for a SimpleSkin, that is the absolute minimum of functionality (c.f. usemod) and a complex skin, be it Pattern or Nat (which is looking very good). All skins should be coded up as Contribs, even SimpleSkin, and removed from the core.

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Yes, this is something that needs to happen. My experience with skins is that the alternatives don't always integrate 100% predictably, so you're facing some tinkering to sort them out or the (for some) daunting task of hacking the standard ones. The best development I've seen lately is NatSkin, because it has a bunch of alternative styles and goes some of the way to addressing this.

-- MarcusLeonard - 08 Nov 2005

I listed all the files and template definitions required by the core code in TWikiSkins (DEVELOP branch)

CC

Perhaphs it would be nice to gather requirements for this ClassicSkin replacement, like:

• no Javascript
• use the "T" logo
• no CSS
• only the standard files + twiki.simple.tmpl
• minimise use of macros
• simple construction, heavily commented
• take advantage of the distributed default WebLeftBar's

-- AntonioTerceiro - 09 Nov 2005 -- CrawfordCurrie - 10 Nov 2005

We keep building more than skins, we build functionality. This functionality needs consolidating so that it is available to all skins. Skins should not be allowed to have any functionality.

ConsolidateFunctionalityFromSkins, ConsolidateIntoFewerSkins

-- MartinCleaver - 10 Nov 2005

Is it allowed that skins depend on a specific set of plugins? Sure. And even plugins that are custom-tailored for a specific skin? Admitted, your argument is still valid. Note, that whenever possible things should not be added to the core but to a skin contrib or plugin which can be released independent from the "kernel". This is essential facing the looong TWiki release cycles.

-- MichaelDaum - 10 Nov 2005

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Of course. But Martin is right, skin packages themselves should contain no functionality. I have added to Antonios requirements above.

CC

I can easily understand all the requirements above, except for "no CSS". Crawford, can you elaborate on that?

IMO a modern and accessible CSS-driven design can be very maintainable (and can still be usable without browser CSS support), what I can't say about non-CSS designs.

Added one more requirement.

-- AntonioTerceiro - 10 Nov 2005