68kMLA Wiki talk:Custom skin

general discussion

I've always thought it would be pretty cool to recreate the Mac OS GUI as a theme/skin here. We've taken some baby steps in that direction by using some appropriate fonts, using templates that look like dialog boxes and Stickies, etc. Here's a general outline of how I think we could fit the wiki UI into a Mac appearance.

About this site (entire site menu from current left nav goes here) Control Panels > (expands to User, User Talk, Preferences, Watchlist, Contributions)	File Page Page Talk History	Edit Edit New section (appears on Talk pages)	View (entire Toolbox menu from current left nav goes here)	Special (right end of current tab nav; i.e. Move, Watch/Unwatch, etc.; goes here) Logout	Help		Namespace
Page a big "document window" goes here - white background encompassing the entire "content area" of the page, with a title bar being the main heading							Main Page icon Community Portal icon Recent Changes icon Random Page icon Policy icon

Note that we'd be going from a primarily left-side nav to primarily right-side nav. The menu bar at the top of the page stays locked in place (non scrolling). The application (namespace) "menu" would change to say "Editor" when editing a page. I've not looking into skinning MediaWiki at all, but I assume all the bits and pieces can be modified contextually.

I'd like to have the background be one of the well-known textures, but maybe those are copyrighted? Not much of it would be visible, in any case, but it would be cool.

There are a number of sites that have done a Mac GUI motif fairly successfully. I think we could borrow some ideas from them and come up with something pretty sweet. ⇔ ChristTrekker ⌘ 17:46, 6 October 2009 (UTC)