Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

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Federico
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Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Federico »

Hi Paul,
I think your design solutions are excellent, I know that making things simple, logic and clean is a hard work and that you only know that the result is good when you wont add or subtract anything to what you have done so far.
I was also very impressed from the skin of your main wiki page, there I found nice to have both a horizzontal and a handsome vertical navbar. I was interested in that solution. I also thought about making a second navbar "namespace sensitive", this using css based on namespace and using a bit of php to create a new navbar (topnavbar). Would be this a good idea for you? I think that it reduces a bit the area for articles but it gives many solutions for wikis based on different group members (with customizables navbars). You think you will in the future merge in an organic solution your two projects, vertical & horizontal skins?
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Paul
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Paul »

Right now, the top navi menu is the first menu section of the mediawiki:sidebar, the rest of the menu section will go to the side navi bar.

If there is only one menu section in mediawiki:sidebar, then it will show the top navi menu only without the side navi bar. There is no hard-coded navi menu in my wiki.

Check the mediawiki:sidebar in my wiki, you will see how menu works...
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Federico
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Federico »

Good solution to manage both navigation bars using only one configuration page, is this solution downloadable? Where can I find that skin?
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Paul »

Well, this is just my experiment, I haven't thought about as a release yet...
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Federico
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Federico »

Well, if I can suggest you this, in this pages, I'll think it would be usefull to have this third experiment to try and custumize.

Maybe in this skin future development you will consider to make this appear more like an XY Catresian axis layout, with header on top, x axis as top main menu, y axis as detailed menu, and in the intersection maybe a search form or some other logo... .

Offcourse I'm aware you already spent your time and you've done so much (and with big care) for us. Thank you for that. I could not manage to do such good skins by my own, but with a bit of time I'll try to do my best in this "merging" project if you like. As a php and mediawiki noob I wont do much more than copy and paste operations, but your way of dividing php code via functions and your stile of commenting, make your code readable also for me

Please let me know if you think you will provide such or a similar release next
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Paul »

Yep, I understand and agree with you. The main reason I'm not crazy about this sidebar menu is tough to make it dynamic in mediawiki without big modification; it will just a extra menu list. That's why I'm still wondering if this is good or very useful.

But I will take a detail look to see what I can come up, if you have a good idea, please let me know as well, so I might "merge" those two menus.
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Federico »

Ok, I try to write down just a couple of ideas... also for my own, to clarify what the goal is and what are the problems to solve:
  • First of all I think we want to use a data structure similar to the one provided in mediawiki:sidebar page. The function involved in this is buildSidebar() located in wiki/incluces/skin.php . That function queries the wiki page and builds up an array with chapters (text) and links (text | url).
  • We want to mantain the data structure in order to don't change too much the code and the customization of the users (its not an extension)
  • I would for example suggest this:
    Y axis are chapters (with only one * at the beginning of the row);
    X axis are links (with two ** at the beginning of the row);
  • what we want is that when a user selects a chapter (Y) the X axis changes accordingly showing the links belonging to that chapter
  • So we have build up a static array, now what we need are:
    - Verify if the user have the rights to see some links or not and generate a clean list wihout links the user shouldn't see
    - Use cookies to track down what was the choice of the user (what paragraph was chosen during last navigation) so that only the paragraph chosen content will be dinamically written by our php function on top of our X div.
Some tecnical problems may be there, maybe changing and renaming the buildSidebar function to buildGubars would help. I even don't know if its possible to include that new funtion in the GumaxVH.php (vertival-horizontal, you like the name?) to provide some better features as:
  • rights check for users groups
  • providing to the paragraphs an optional url field like the links they contain (also using for them the "|" division)
  • providing some dinamic css to links or paragraph (using a second"|" division after the link title var)
  • adding some formatting and titles to vertical menu (trough rows without * at their beginning, in mediawiki:sidebar
This seems to introduce new features (mantaining the old ones in the page mediawiki:sidebar), maybe this would be more correct to provide in an extension witch should be the right way to provide new functionality, but I think you prefer to avoid this way.

Another way to provide a similar effect is to create many mediawiki:sidebar($ns) pages based on namespaces (this idea came to me thinking at dinamic css based on namespaces) and displaying those customizable pages data intercepting the current namespace via $wgTitle->getNamespace(). This idea is what I needed for my project. The other is more general as it don't need more configuration than the one of the mediawiki:sidebar page (whitch is already a standard).

I hope I'm not to far from one possible solution. As I told you I'm a noob of php, mysql and vars scope (cookies). Also I can't immagine if the idea I described works or has other tecnical problems or some problems that involve security issues. You think this approach will work?
By the way, thank for your kind and fast replys. You're great
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Federico »

:idea:
I've seen a nice idea trough my navigation. I was wondering around trough the web searching for a built in forum. I found interesting http://wiki.anotherwebcom.com/Category: ... _Extension. What you think about that forum implemented within mediawiki? That extension seems to have many interesting features and maybe with a little bit of work it would appear really nice... . But this was off-topic. What I found next was an implementation of it: http://www.freggers-wiki.de/wiki/index. ... l:AWCforum. Look at the sidebar on the right, the top buttons change with some javascript dinamically the css, changing, I think, the margins of a div, so that only the right content will appear on the page when the button is selected. The visual shifting is interesting. So, with some js we could build up the entire table mentioned in the previous post and make it move (changing css?) via js and onclik event. I've seen they use a fix div and within a scroller div.
I don't like very much the of the page they have. It was only to show you the scrolling and an idea of XY organization. I'd prefer divs on top and left of the page, at the border of the wikipage content, not a look that makes me remeber frames. Here some css they use:

http://www.freggers-wiki.de/wiki/skins/ ... glider.css
http://www.freggers-wiki.de/wiki/skins/ ... eggers.css
http://www.freggers-wiki.de/wiki/skins/ ... mplate.css

As you see from the last link they seem to use your skin
Your work is apreciated worldwide
:)

I think the right place to look for the code is
http://www.dyn-web.com/code/scroll/
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Paul
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Paul »

I know what you mean, and I was thing about using (X) and (Y) layout with some degree "dynamic", however this status is not consistent, the "dynamic" bar will be reset every time you click on one of the article, since mediawiki doesn't provide strong logic relation between menus like Joomla, so this is big disadvantage, maybe use name space as a logic connection is a good idea... but I still need to find how much modification that is required; as you mentioned, I don't want to change too much as for a "skin", since a skin is not supposed to be an extension.

The links you provide are nice, good work though, the dynamic menu that is in Spezial:AWCforum seems having same issue, whenever you click one of the links inside the menu, the menu will be reset to a default. I'm not sure if this is something that user don't care too much, but from my design point of view, this is not good, and I rather go with static. Static menu seems not well categorized, but at least gives better usability. ;)

Making things simple and easy is always best way to go... :)
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Federico
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Re: Merge Gumax Horizzontal & Vertical Skins

Post by Federico »

There seems to be everything on the web:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SidebarEx or
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CustomSidebar with
$wgDefaultSideBarText = '{{NAMESPACE}}:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Sidebar' in Localsettings.php

This extensions (I didn't try it yet) seems to do a bit of the work I needed. Much easier to change something in that code than write it from the beginning for me. 8-)
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