New Arch Wiki appearance

nl6720 · 2021-12-22 20:17:44

To summarize why and how it all happened:

In the beginning the wiki was not very readable on mobile and people were not happy about it. See FS#46697.
MediaWiki's Vector skin gained an option to enable responsive design that made it usable both on desktop and mobile. The wiki was switched the from Monobook skin to Vector (now called legacy Vector or Vector 1) and the $wgVectorResponsive option was enabled. See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=229523 .
Everything was going well until MediaWiki decided to break $wgVectorResponsive on legacy Vector. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T242772 . This made ArchWiki unreadable on mobile.
It was not possible to unbreak legacy Vector and new Vector was not compatible with ArchWiki's modifications (i.e. the ArchLinux extension).
The ArchLinux extension was updated to support the new Vector (see https://github.com/archlinux/archwiki/pull/44). This made the wiki readable to mobile users, but you needed to manually uncheck "Use Legacy Vector" in wiki preferences.
I (yes, me, the evil Wiki Admin) submitted a change to enable the new Vector skin by default. See https://github.com/archlinux/archwiki/pull/45 and https://github.com/archlinux/archwiki/pull/47.

What is that new theme?
It's something MediaWiki considers a improvement. Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/ … provements for all the details.

So what can be done now?
If you don't like it, log in, go to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Specia … -rendering and check "Use Legacy Vector". Alternatively manually append ?useskinversion=1 to all wiki URLs you visit.

Will it be changed back?
No! The new theme stays. If you have issues with it, complain to upstream: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/

Can the sidebar be made visible by default?
Yes. For logged in users it remembers the last position. For logged out users it's controlled with the $wgVectorDefaultSidebarVisibleForAnonymousUser option which is false by default. To enable it, someone needs to submit a pull request to change ArchWiki's LocalSettings.php.

P.S. For existing wiki users, the theme is not changed.

Last edited by nl6720 (2021-12-22 20:45:06)

WorMzy · 2022-01-03 15:58:08

Mod note: Split from https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=272456

Arch Linux

#1 2021-12-22 20:17:44

New Arch Wiki appearance

#2 2022-01-03 15:58:08

Re: New Arch Wiki appearance

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