I think I like this idea a lot.

What do you think about a Special page (Special:CustomizeAppearance) or something that includes drop-down menus and a preview of what the changes will look like. You could use it to do basic and straightforward customizations such as changing font color or header style or font family site-wide. The Special page could store the customizations in the database and it would simply generate the necessary CSS and output it below the default skin CSS (Vector, for now).

Is this similar to what you had in mind?

Yes, but as an extension, e.g. it would not be enabled on foundation wikis but perfect for 3rd party installs of mediawiki.

I would also expect this same UI to be where extensions are enabled as well.

one other major think would be to customize site logo, including upload

It would be nice to allow for a single cue color that gets applied to lots of elements rather than having to specify a bunch of colors individually, something similar to tumblrs configuration https://www.dropbox.com/s/h0p2tq06n6jj4a2/Screenshot%202014-01-21%2017.57.22.png

"Themable" icons are also very effective in UI differentiation. The same goes for the styling of buttons.

Offering a package with all these configurations isn't trivial, but there is probably some low-hanging fruit to get started (e.g. reading the icons from a site-specific directory before falling back to the general Vector directory).

On a related note, this morning I was celebrating [[mw:Winter]] because it proposes to get rid of the blue lines that Vector has so deeply hardcoded. Little changes like this can enable a lot of flexibility for branding and UI customization, not just for Wikimedia but for everybody.

It could be in core, but perhaps disabled on WMF wikis (or access restricted to interfaceeditors or something).

(In reply to comment #2)

Yes, but as an extension, e.g. it would not be enabled on foundation wikis
but
perfect for 3rd party installs of mediawiki.

I would also expect this same UI to be where extensions are enabled as well.

one other major think would be to customize site logo, including upload

That's getting way out of scope, and starts touching on things like config management and extension installation.

It was originally a request to do it in core, though an extension is also possible.

Maybe this has to be an extension as part of the development and testing process, I don't know. What is clear is that such functionality would be desired by most MediaWiki users just out of the box.

I imagine the progress in this area being done more through isolated tasks (reports) that help integrating this functionality in core rather than the development of a full extension offering all this functionality at once. Then again I'm not a developer that will be working on this, so never mind. :)

Yes, I believe this should be in core.

This placeholder page was created today based on on a conversation at the arch summit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CustomizationExtension lets use it to start capturing requirement for this feature.

Related, a GSoC project:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix/A_modern,_scalable_and_attractive_skin_for_MediaWiki_(GSoC_2014_proposal)

"Much like many WordPress themes, the skin will also provide some different color schemes and other CSS customizations (themes, as they're called in the MediaWiki world) for site administrators to choose from. This is something that no core MediaWiki skin currently provides, despite being an easy way to visually distinguish your site from all the other sites that use the same underlying software."

(In reply to Quim Gil from comment #10)

Related, a GSoC project:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix/A_modern,
_scalable_and_attractive_skin_for_MediaWiki_(GSoC_2014_proposal)

This page has no content on it.

"Much like many WordPress themes, the skin will also provide some different
color schemes and other CSS customizations (themes, as they're called in the
MediaWiki world) for site administrators to choose from. This is something
that no core MediaWiki skin currently provides, despite being an easy way to
visually distinguish your site from all the other sites that use the same
underlying software."

(In reply to Bill Traynor from comment #11)

This page has no content on it.

Make sure the last letter of the URL is a bracket: )

• Bug 62899 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***