Free Software Directory:Features/Skin

Free Software Directory style improvements

To understand the current state of the skin on the Directory, you should know that we were in the process of basically trying to get the Vector skin customized to look more like the custom skin that can be found on directory-dev.fsf.org.

We decided that instead of going with a completely custom Skin, we would like to instead make some minimal modifications to Vector (currently we use the version that ships with MediaWiki 1.20.2). Ideally, the customizations we make to Vector will be done in a way that we will easily be able to patch newer versions of Vector when we upgrade MediaWiki, so that we can continue to use the latest version of Vector.

The elements we want to add to Vector are basically just the custom menu bar, donate badge, and FSD logo from directory-dev and www.fsf.org. Additionally, it would be OK if the menu bar and top of the page used a little less vertical height than those on directory-dev or www.fsf.org. Further, since we want to make it easy to maintain our custom patch, it is not required that the log-in and create user links (or the custom user links that appear when logged in) do not need to be moved into the top of the page.

Lastly, please note that the CSS used on www.fsf.org and directory-dev.fsf.org provide a lot more style definitions than are needed in order to implement the functionality required. And, we suspect that these CSS files are causing conflicts with the CSS of other extensions we use (specifically, the use of YUI grids). So, it would be preferable if the implementation was done from scratch and didn't need to rely-upon a lot of extra CSS.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me on IRC or on my talk page(username for both is jgay) or email me at jgay@fsf.org.