Last modified: 2014-03-07 11:44:13 UTC
ULS looks and works great for me, after trying it on my home wiki (enwiki) and others. Major kudos! I noticed that ULS currently has button styles that very closely match the standard used in mediawiki.ui. Both seem to be based on the "Agora" guidelines from Pau and the design team, so it would probably save you from having to use custom styles if you convert to using the mediawiki.ui library. We're already standardizing on it in Echo, GuidedTour, GettingStarted, as well as login and account creation in core, so if you need support or have feedback on how reusable the styles are, others folks in features engineering are available to advise. I noted only converting the controls (i.e. buttons) in this enhancement request, because while the current version of mediawiki.ui specifies a font family stack, we're eventually going to phase that out in favor of applying any new font stack to skins, where they properly belong.
The Agora styles mw-ui-button, mw-ui-primary (for the blue) and mw-ui-button-group get most of the way there. The larger font in ULS makes the buttons pretty big so Agora needs a modifier or a rethink, and perhaps the "down" state should be moved into Agora as mw-ui-down. Bug 48067 enumerates all our inconsistent close icons, including this one.
I support this, but there is a constraint that ULS has to support MediaWiki 1.20 and newer still. That is likely to complicate or slow down the process.
(In reply to comment #2) ULS in 1.20 and 1.21 could require Extension:Agora (where the CSS was originally developed). https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/69458/ makes Extension:Agora a backport of the mediawiki.ui module for earlier releases.
I would prefer to just backport mediawiki.ui. It has no dependencies, so this should be relatively straight-forward.
This is a little bit complicated by the fact that bug 54485 (converting SASS to LESS is almost finished). That means to do a simple backport we'd also have to backport the LESS infrastructure. But I think it's okay to backport the compiled CSS files to the old versions. The CSS files would only be accepted in the old release branches, and only direct compiles from the LESS files could be committed. It depends how important this consistency is. The simplest solution is to wait for ULS to drop support for 1.20 and 1.21, tolerating a little temporary inconsistency.
Siebrand what do you say, We'd like to get all the extensions on board with the mediawiki.ui work but i don't want to do anything that is throw away. Could you weigh in on whether you want to go ahead with what Matt suggests or wait till the branch is updated(?)
ULS has compatibility with MediaWiki 1.20. I don't plan on making it incompatible with 1.21 until 1.23 has been released. Compatibility with 1.20 will probably be removed a month after the 1.22 release.
Matt, given that 1.20 and 1.21 will need support for some time more, what do you recommend?
I recommend we wait until ULS requires 1.22+. Currently, mediawiki.ui is not in 1.20 or 1.21 at all. If we later decide to backport mediawiki.ui in some form (either with the LESS infrastructure, or just the compiled CSS), we could reconsider. However, I'm okay with waiting for this.
I'd also suggest not backporting mediawiki.ui (and thus waiting for ULS to drop support for older MediaWikis to implement this in it) – such a large change in a point release (minor version) would likely be a pain to manage for people installing extensions and wondering why the styles don't show.
