Last modified: 2011-02-08 21:57:17 UTC
When a wiki's local [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]] (or any other style sheet) is revised significantly, the old style sheet is not flushable, as the software's /skins-1.5/monobook/main.css can be with $wgStyleVersion. Is it possible to create a message similar to the $wgStyleVersion, such as [[MediaWiki:Monobook_css_version]], that can be used to flush caches remotely? The same could be used with [[MediaWiki:Monobook.js]] as well.
Shouldn't there be a MediaWiki namespace way of updating this, so we don't have to persuade a developer to change the parameter every time?
That's the issue - looking at the HTML source of a rendered page, the CSS does not have any way to be purged remotely, even by developers.
An alternative would be to append the timestamp of the current revision of the CSS page to the URI which causes it to be included. This would be similar to how $wgStyleVersion works, and wouldn't require administrators to remember to update a second message with each customisation.
That works, although I worry about issues with admins modifying whitespace or doing other trivial changes. Those could have a harsh impact on server load... :(
Something I didn't mention, of course, is something which Brion phrased effectively: "that implies you know it, in which case you're doing several extra database lookups for every page view".
Hmm... that implies you know the timestamp of the latest version? (I'm not sure if I understood)... that could be written on memory somewhere. In a way, it seems ok that if a change to a skin CSS file was done within a wiki, the number should be changed manually only if the impact to the appearance of the site is bad enough...
Shouldn't this just happen when someone edits [[MediaWiki:Common.css]]?
Definitely. It's worth the extra server load for everyone to see the same display. It should happen when [[MediaWiki:Common.css]], [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]], [[MediaWiki:Common.js]], and any of the other skin-specific css's and js's are updated.
(In reply to comment #7) > Shouldn't this just happen when someone edits [[MediaWiki:Common.css]]? The problem is *making it* happen.
Again, can't the timestamp be stored in the message cache? Or another message stored in the cache, like I suggested originally?
This ticket has been open for quite a while, so I'm wondering if there is still interest in getting this to happen. I would definitely love to see this happen since the Wikimedia caching strategy can make any site-wide style changes a time-consuming process. I've seen multiple instances on both Wikipedia and Wiktionary where inline styles were left in templates to force client displays to look correct for the month or so that we have to wait to be sure that all users caches have caught up. If we can come to some agreement as to the mechanism, I have no problem providing a patch for this.
Just following up on this ticket again, it seems like Titoxd's suggestion would be workable. Is there a reason that solution wouldn't work?
Should work, in theory. Note a general issue with the use of version markers on style URLs like this: the updated version marker bumps the URL to ensure that any *newly* rendered page, with the new URL, will show up with a fresh copy of the new external resource. Older cached HTML (eg, cached pages for anonymous visitors) will still include the older URLs as long as they remain in cache, so will get the older resource as long as _that_ also remains in cache. So while this will guarantee bumps for logged-in users who are always bumping their own cache invalidation timestamps, and for newly-changed pages, it *won't* push the updates to every page everywhere at once.
Created attachment 5359 [details] a patch to purge site css after edit A simple patch that causes a skin css to be purged after an edit. Note that there may be required some changes in your Squid config too.
See also bug 17524
ResourceLoader takes care of this, see also bug 17524
