Last modified: 2013-04-21 14:50:05 UTC
Currently the nav bar, parts of the footer, various system messages, etc, can be customized by changing "MediaWiki:" pages. Currently however, the site's logo has to be changed by manually editing LocalSettings.php in a text editor and changing $wgLogo. I would like to suggest that the site's logo instead be customizable by using a MediaWiki page, such as "MediaWiki:Logo" or "MediaWiki:sitelogo". "MediaWiki:Logo" could for example contain something like this: "[[Image:old-logo.png]]" (or maybe just "old-logo.png", if that seems preferable). A wiki admin user could then update the site's logo to "[[Image:new-logo.png]]", without ever having to involve a system administrator by getting them to manually edit LocalSettings.php. Result: More empowered users, and slightly less hassled sysadmins.
How would this be different from setting $wgLogo to the hashed path of the logo image on the wiki once upon setup, and leaving the users to it thereafter?
It would be different in the following ways: 1) The old logo image would not have to be over-written with a new logo of the same name, so users could try something and revert it easily. 2) The logo could be changed on special occasions with a switch statement. E.g. Halloween, Wikipedia's birthday, Christmas, St Patrick's day. (And before you say no sane person would want to do this, I have two words for you: Google's Homepage). 3) The logo could be semi-randomized - for example: "{{if: {{expr: {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} % 2}} = 1 | [[Image:Logo-1.png]] | [[Image:Logo-2.png]] }}" 4) It would be consistent with the trend towards editing the "MediaWiki:" namespace to customize a wiki. 5) It's a fundamentally nicer interface for the user/sysadmin than editing a text file. 6) You can preview any changes to make sure it's what you want before you commit your changes, which you can't with $wgLogo in a text file. 7) It would have history, so you could see what changed, by whom, and when. 8) You could watch it, and see who changes it and how. 9) You could discuss it on its talk page. ... basically in every way that a wiki article is superior to editing a text file on a command line, so "MediaWiki:Logo" would be superior to $wgLogo.
Also sounds expensive.
Presumably it'd have a quite similar run-time expense to the current "MediaWiki:Sidebar".
(In reply to comment #4) > Presumably it'd have a quite similar run-time expense to the current > "MediaWiki:Sidebar". Which is cached to hell and back. In fact, the sidebar cache is so ingrained, we had a period of having to actually fight it into submission when we wanted to edit the damn thing.
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Logo/
This should be implemented in core rather than as an extension since it is as hard for inexperienced users to add an extension as it is to change the logo. I think it is a needed feature though. I recently saw a competion where high schools competed in building web sites. MediaWiki was one of 3 cms's in use (the others being Joomla and WordPress) and I'm sad to say that not one of the teams using MediaWiki managed to change the logo or change skin. This does not seem to have been an issue for the teams using Joomla or WordPress.
I'm not sure whether it is a good idea for adding custom solutions for this. Imho it would be more useful to improve the configure extension, for example.
This particular feature seems to function properly in the configure extension all ready. Maybe the configure extension just needs to be installed by default when installing MediaWiki... Or may be we need an on-wiki extension installer so that extensions like this can be easily installed (it would be nice if such an extension manager could also handle installation of skins).
We http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family users might have tens of (wikis, each with tens of) logos, all via $wgLogo, so please whatever you do, make sure $wgLogo will still work too if not overridden.
Adding this (despite WONTFIX) as blocker to Bug#26992 so that we can see solutions that have been discussed.
Changing the resolution of this. The general request is that it be possible to edit the logo from the wiki, rather than requiring LocalSettings.php to be edited. The opening poster is correct that allowing nearly all customizations through the MediaWiki interface except the logo is odd and inconsistent. This functionality appears to have been implemented in the Configure extension, making this "fixed," not "wontfix."
