Last modified: 2008-10-06 08:25:29 UTC
On the English Wiktionary we are currently devising a bunch of ways for users to customize what they see in various ways. These are implemented using templates which contain CSS to hide unwanted variants and show only the preferred variant. The problem is that the vast majority of users don't know about and don't want to know about editing the custom CSS files. If we had a preferences page that resulted in a CSS page somewhere this would completely solve the problem. The page or pages would need to be customizable via MediaWiki: messages much like the navigation bar and internationalized strings are currently implemented. The resulting CSS might be a whole other internal CSS page like wikibits which is not editable by the user, of it could simply be served as part of the current custom CSS page but not presented to UserName:Fred/monobook.css etc
It's not generation of CSS that we need, since we can already generate CSS with templates. Specifically, we ned two things: # Enable us to add options to a (new?) tab on [[Special:Preferences]] # Expose a way to save the output of a template programatically. E.g. if a query string could use the "preload" option to overlay whatever already exists at [[Special:Mypage/monobook.css]], the user could then see the generated CSS and commit that CSS over their existing monobook.css.
Please provide an example of something which couldn't be added as a user preference (even via an extension), but which could be added in some other form. Something about the request doesn't add up to me. A lot of dynamic programming of core functions through wiki markup et al. makes me very nervous.
There is no specific request to avoid adding user preferences or extensions. Existing ParserFunctions are able to producing content for .css files, but if you would prefer to generate .css file content using a server extension, that would be great as well. Regardless of how the CSS is generated, the key missing component now is to allow users customize and save their .css preferences using an extensible set of preferences without having them open their CSS file manually. Ideally, each user customization (e.g. whether to show certain classes of words in italics) would be managed as a user preference. Given specific settings for those preferences, a CSS file can be created that will cause the pages to display as the user desires. Users comfortable with CSS already change their [[Special:Mypage/monobook.css]] files to accomplish the customization today. The majority of users, however, are sqeamish even about copy-pasting sample CSS over their [[Special:Mypage/monobook.css]]. We are just looking to assist those users with modifying their CSS preferences. I suggested the solution that I hoped would be the least amount of developer work: allowing the "preload" query string parameter to overlay existing [[Special:Mypage/monobook.css]]. By allowing that option to overlay the existing .css, we could write our own CSS generation in the form of ParserFunctions. If I understand your reply above, it seems to recommend a more complete solution, i.e. adding user preferences and somehow linking those preferences to the server-side generation of users' css files.
The Gadgets extension looks just suitable solution for this request.
