Last modified: 2014-09-25 21:15:35 UTC
We should have a sane way of including screenshots with skins and displaying them in the UI. These would be useful on Special:Preferences, in the installer when it will ask you which skin to choose, on Special:Version… I coded up something that works but is probably not a good idea at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/138110/ – this would just add support for a new key to $wgExtensionCredits. One interesting issue is, what resolution should we expect the screenshot to be? Another one is, how do we display it? Unless we want to push the whole thing through ResourceLoader CSS handling (which would be extremely silly), we need to know the URL path where the screenshot is available (relative to $wgStylePath?). This is not obvious :(
What's wrong with ?useskin? Except in the installer. That would need something fancier, or something. Unless there'd be some way to safely automatically include them temporarily for preview... er... I don't know where I was going with that.
I actually agree with Isarra somewhat - a preview is better than a screenshot. That said the current experience is terrible. Previewing the preference page for one makes no sense - it would be far better to see something in the main namespace rendered via the chosen skin. Tumblr does a great job in its theme interface. You can select and search for skins and they instantly get applied so it's easy to flick between them and see the skin in the context of an ipsum lorem article. This could be a great opportunity to break skins out of Special:Preferences - maybe Special:Preferences/Skin and just provide a good simple interface for skin switching - maybe a drop down at the top and an Ipsum lorem article rendered below. When we have templating in core we could even do this rendering via JavaScript :-).
We wouldn't want it to get too complicated, both on the admin and on the user end, but I dunno. If nothing else, having a small thumbnail just so there's something visual at all would certainly be useful, but we can't expect the thumbnail/screenshot to do much beyond that. So... er... there should be both. We should have both things - a more immediate preview mechanism, and a small thumbnail for initial eye-catching and later locating in the list.
