15 October 2015, 0:59

Hello

I have a doubt regarding the skin feature.  Our users saw this feature in the user manual and ask us to enable it.

However, when i compare the french user documentation VS the english documentation, the information is slightly different.

The english manual specifies "Skins is an experimental feature in Mahara 1.8 for theming pages. "(link to doc) (i understand experimental only in the old version 1.8) whereas the french manual specifies "L’habillage des pages est une fonction expérimentale apparue dans Mahara 1.8 " (link to doc) = my translation would be : "Skins is an experimental feature since Mahara 1.8".  The meaning is different, as we plan to enable this feature in our Mahara 15.04, we want to double check that it's no longer an experimental feature (and therefore a safe feature).

Thanks for your confirmation

Emilie

18 October 2015, 21:31

Hello Emilie,

The reference to "Experimental" was removed in the English original version of the user manual in Mahara 1.10 on the main page for skins. Thanks for pointing it out in the site administration. I changed that sentence in the English version and the change should be visible tomorrow. I'll also update the language files so that the translators can see the change.

Please note that skins can be displayed differently on themes depending on how much is changed. We refactored skins somewhat for 15.10 to make them be displayed better.

Cheers

Kristina

20 October 2015, 11:00

Hello Emilie,

The lang string is available in the French translation now. You can translate it on Launchpad.

Cheers

Kristina

22 October 2015, 10:15

To expand on what Kristina said, skins is not an "experimental" feature anymore. We're pretty confident that it's safe. In fact, we were strongly considering turning on skins by default in Mahara 15.10! But there are still a few "rough edges" to the feature that I wanted to resolve first.

The main thing, is the redundancy between the older feature of "page themes", and page skins. The "page themes" feature lets users select which of Mahara's installed themes, should be used to display their page. While this is different from a skin (which is completely configurable) it's similar enough to be quite confusing. I'd like to resolve this by adding a "base theme" setting to skins, so that if you choose a particular skin, it uses a particular Mahara theme as its starting point before applying the skin customizations. But, we didn't have the time to implement that yet.

The other main remaining issue with skins, is that, because they're tied so intimately to themes, they tend to "break" and no longer look good after upgrading Mahara to a new major version. So I'd like to add some kind of parameter to a skin that indicates which version(s) of Mahara it was written for, to sort of help users navigate around this problem.

So, those are the usability reasons why skins are still off by default. But from a security standpoint, they're perfectly safe. And users do seem to like them. :)

Cheers,

Aaron

22 October 2015, 12:15

Hi Aaron,

I was going to turn skins on in 1.10 around December, but there is a chance we will be upgrading to 15.10 next year (depending on the outcomes of a procurement process). After what you have said it seems that might be a mistake, as we would have a flood of users telling us their skins don't work anymore. Especially moving from the inhouse 1.10 responsive theme to 15.10 Bootstrap 3.

What would your advice be? (Hold off or "Don't worry we will have that covered with a skins migration script that gets users most of the way")

:)

Thanks.

23 October 2015, 15:39

Hello Shane,

I just trialled a skin created in Mahara 1.10 on Mahara 15.10 and it worked. We removed some customization options to make the skins work better with a theme, but the other elements that could be customized migrated fine. The skins don't save the theme and thus aren't tied to the theme in that way but take any underlying theme as basis.

TBH, the skins look better in 15.10 because of the refactoring and restricting some previously existing options. Of course, if someone knows CSS, they can still overwrite pretty much everything in the "Advanced" CSS area of the skin.

Any existing themes will need to be re-done using the Bootstrap way and there is already some documentation available on how to do that at different complexity levels.

Cheers

Kristina

23 October 2015, 17:17

Excellent that's great news! I've been looking forward to turning this feature on for so long, to wait another 6 months would be painful.

Thanks for testing that out!

Shane.

07 November 2015, 0:11

Hello Kristina and all

Thanks for your confirmation, we've just turned on this feature :-)

Emilie