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Wikitravel talk:Interface issues

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[edit] More than one way to skin a Wikitravel

So, I've been thinking about the user interface on Wikitravel, and I think there are some things that could stand changing or rearranging. As some may know, MediaWiki has a skinnable interface -- we can modify the UI to make it more customized to Wikitravel. Writing a skin is hairy, but I'd make that effort if we had a good design to work with.

I have my personal beefs with the Cologne Blue skin for MediaWiki we use:

  • the confusing overabundance of links, and search boxes
  • the huge amount of dead space at the top of the page
  • the fact that the layout area doesn't have a prescribed width
  • there's no good place to put our logo
  • the color scheme doesn't go with the logo, anyways

I'm sure that lots of other people have things they'd like to see changed, too.

I'm wondering if people with HTML skills would be interested in doing a skin design contest. People could submit HTML mockups for a new interface, and we could discuss them and vote on them. We could take the top one or two or three candidates and make them into skins, and make the top one the default for not-logged-in users. Obviously, people could choose to continue to use the skin they want.

Would anyone be interested in this? I don't want to start a contest if nobody's gonna participate. B-) --Evan 16:32, 8 Mar 2004 (EST)

So, uh... let's just scupper this contest. Maj and I started working on a new skin this weekend; you can see the work in progress here. Any comments or criticisms are more than welcome. --Evan 13:48, 14 Mar 2004 (EST)
Yes, I like it and links are much easier to find. Yann 13:55, 14 Mar 2004 (EST)
Nice. I'd like to see the table of contents laid out like Cologne Blue ( ie a border, maybe a background colour )but it might not look good hard up against the navigation box on the left hand side. --Caffeine 16:01, 15 Mar 2004 (EST)
I just noticed that the signatures have EST time stamps - I guess that's EST North America (UTC-5), not EST Australia (UTC+10) or EEST Europe (UTC+3)? That's not a very clear naming scheme eh? --Caffeine 03:41, 16 Mar 2004 (EST)

[edit] Proposed new skin

Hi all, so as some of you know I've been working on a new skin for Wikitravel. This one will let us switch style-sheets on the fly, and other users should be able to contribute their own stylesheets for it.

There's a demo installation of Mediawiki with my Wikitravel skin here.

So far it only works correctly in Mozilla/FireFox and IE 6.x. I'm tuning it for KDE's Konqueror next. It might be reasonable to have user-selected stylesheets for other browsers, or perhaps I should work those into the main three styles. -- Mark 06:21, 30 Oct 2005 (EST)

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