User blog:Jack Phoenix/Attention all DeepSea users

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If you've been following ShoutWiki news recently, you may have noticed a rather major update to the Theme extension we rolled out just a few days before the latest version of MediaWiki, MediaWiki 1.29, was released. Now that we've also upgraded our MediaWiki successfully to 1.29, it's time to say goodbye to the DeepSea skin.

Wait what? Don't panic!

If you've read the blog post linked above (and if not, you totally should!), you'll know by now that skin and theme (as well as template) are distinct concepts. The DeepSea theme is a bunch of additional CSS rules on top of the Vector skin, and the theme is maintained by SamanthaNguyen. The DeepSea theme is not going anywhere.
If you are using the DeepSea skin, please go to Special:Preferences, switch to the Vector skin, save your preferences, then choose the "Appearance" tab and the DeepSea theme from the theme drop-down menu and save your preferences again. Voilà, you're now using the supported, stable version of DeepSea!

As to why we're doing this, the answer is pretty simple. Skins are complex pieces of software and maintaning them is no easy task. When you have a whole skin, the PHP and JavaScript parts, too, need maintaining, and MediaWiki upgrades can break the skin, which would require additional fixing and testing. Give the overwhelming similarity between DeepSea and Vector as well as the fact it was possible to reimplement DeepSea in pure CSS, it only seemed obvious to do that.

I've intentionally chosen not to repeat a lot of the information that can be found on the blog post about Theme v. 2.0 release, so please check it out and if you have any questions that neither that post nor this post answers, make sure to post a comment in the comments section of this post!

Comments (8)

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Jack PhoenixBricktastic

82 months ago

Score 1

@NovaHawk: I hope I didn't scare you too much with this blog. :P We're actually always expanding our skin portfolio because we do not believe in the "one skin fits all" mantra; it's indeed the easiest solution from a developer's point of view as having more skins means more moving parts, but we have always recognized the importance of skins and especially the freedom to choose your preferred skin (and theme!).
That being said, there are a lot of MonoBook and Vector clones out there — because MonoBook was the old default skin and Vector is the current default skin — which look absolutely stunning but which would really be better off as themes and not as skins since maintaining a skin is not always easy and can cause issues down the road (generally speaking, that is; MediaWiki skinning is still a rather obscure area that is not well understood by most developers, which is why I'm glad that in the ShoutWiki staff team we have three developers who have years of experience in writing skins).

Thanks for reporting all the issues you found! Samantha's working on the DeepSea stuff you mentioned and Lcawte fixed the OAuth bug so logging into Phabricator via your ShoutWiki account should work again as intended. (For the record, you can also report most bugs on WMF Phabricator if you have an account there; just remember to tag any and all such reports with the #ShoutWiki tag. We don't really advertise this since the workflow might be generally speaking a bit complex, not to mention that WMF sites have their own policies which don't apply on ShoutWiki, and vice versa.)

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SamanthaNguyenBuilding Bigger

82 months ago

Score 0

Also also (sorry, I missed this comment you said :P) If I'm understanding correctly, you tried to create an account on Phabricator by using your ShoutWiki account with OAuth. If this is what you did, then I think you experienced the same issue that Meiko experienced. See User_talk:SamanthaNguyen#ShoutWiki_Phabricator for more info; you'll have to ask Lcawte for help.

For now, you should be able to register a Phabricator account manually (meaning not connecting your SW account to Phab).

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NovaHawkLegendary Brickipedian

82 months ago

Score 0

"it's time to say goodbye to the DeepSea skin."

Oh great, it's Wikia all over again. Is what I thought for a fraction of a second, just as well I read on haha :D

Just making sure- we should be using /vector.css and /vector.js for user stuff now shouldn't we?

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NovaHawkLegendary Brickipedian

82 months ago

Score 0

Also, is this still in the process of being set up? Both the top and left navigation seem to be a bit off. I tried logging in to Phabricator like it said to on the blog but I keep getting "[HTTP/500] Internal Server Error" after pressing "Allow"

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SamanthaNguyenBuilding Bigger

82 months ago

Score 0

Thanks for making a screenshot! Unfortunately I'm unable to reproduce the bug for the content container width :( I can reproduce the bug for the portal headings that have extra space though. Here's my screenshot when accessing the following link ( http://en.br...heme=deepsea ):

https://user...25bbd2de.png

I think this seems like a browser issue, since browsers have varying degrees of support for CSS. Can you tell me what browser you were using (and what version) when you made that screenshot?

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SamanthaNguyenBuilding Bigger

82 months ago

Score 0

Also, I already migrated styles for MediaWiki:Deepsea.css to MediaWiki:Vector.css (which I rewrote to be a smaller and also be more efficient), as well as MediaWiki:Deepsea.js which I slightly modified and migrated to MediaWiki:Vector.js. Apparently this isn't ready yet per the issues you pointed out (thank you! I'm investigating that), so I want to keep the two older on-wiki Deepsea .css/.js for now.

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SamanthaNguyenBuilding Bigger

82 months ago

Score 0

Oops, I think I accidentally misunderstood you! So for personal CSS/JS, you'll want to do that (User:NovaHawk/vector.css + User:NovaHawk/vector.js like you mentioned). If you want whatever you have to only apply to the DeepSea theme, you can prefix your selectors with the .theme-deepsea class. Now I really think I responded to everything you mentioned. :P And I accidentally put my other comment about the Phab stuff as it's own comment instead as a reply. Oops, sorry. :P

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NovaHawkLegendary Brickipedian

82 months ago

Score 0

Yeah, saw you already moved MediaWiki:Deepsea.css over so I wasn't worried about that, anyway I'll move my user files over now, thanks for clarifying :)

I did a little more looking at the container width being too short on the right, and it seems to be confined to the mainspace- the Part, Forum, User blog, User, User talk, Review and Fan namespaces don't seem to have this problem at all. However the left side is still off in all namespaces (the "Page" tab in the screenshot). I was using Safari 10.1.1 to take the screenshot, but having exactly the same problems in Firefox as well (I think it's a bit outdated though... 48.0.2)

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