Re: [directory-discuss] website layout malfunction

[Joshua Gay]

On 05/16/2013 11:46 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
> Since I know how to "skin" mediawiki, perhaps I can help.  

That would be great! We would love your help.

Having the left hand boxes back would be great. There are also a few
other things we'd like to fix. Below is a more detailed description of
how we would like to update the style/skin of the Directory, which can
also be found here,
<http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Skin>.

== Free Software Directory style improvements ==

To understand the current state of the skin on the Directory, you should
know that we were in the process of basically trying to get the Vector
skin customized to look more like the custom skin that can be found on
[http://directory-dev.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page directory-dev.fsf.org].

We decided that instead of going with a completely custom Skin, we would
like to instead make some minimal modifications to Vector (currently we
use the [[Special:Version|version]] that ships with MediaWiki 1.20.2).
Ideally, the customizations we make to Vector will be done in a way that
we will easily be able to patch newer versions of Vector when we upgrade
MediaWiki, so that we can continue to use the latest version of Vector.

The elements we want to add to Vector are basically just the custom menu
bar, donate badge, and FSD logo from directory-dev and
[http://www.fsf.org www.fsf.org]. Additionally, it would be OK if the
menu bar and top of the page used a little less vertical height than
those on directory-dev or www.fsf.org. Further, since we want to make it
easy to maintain our custom patch, it is not required that the log-in
and create user links (or the custom user links that appear when logged
in) do not need to be moved into the top of the page.

Lastly, please note that the CSS used on www.fsf.org and
directory-dev.fsf.org provide a lot more style definitions than are
needed in order to implement the functionality required. And, we suspect
that these CSS files are causing conflicts with the CSS of other
extensions we use (specifically, the use of YUI grids). So, it would be
preferable if the implementation was done from scratch and didn't need
to rely-upon a lot of extra CSS.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me on IRC or on my
talk page(username for both is [[User_talk:Jgay|jgay]]) or email me at
address@hidden