Topic on Talk:Mobile support in MediaWiki core

Mobile and desktop skins are unfortunately two completely different beasts in terms of body output needs. Some people would advocate a mobile-first approach where you develop things for mobile and them layer desktop improvements on top of that. But we've got too much desktop legacy for that.

I suggest this:

• We leave SkinVector, SkinMonoBook, etc... as-is.
• We add a SkinMobile introducing the standard mobile skin.
  • SkinMobile very liberally introduces methods that can be hooked into to extend the skin with whatever types of branding a wiki may want on their mobile view
• We add a $wgMobileDefaultSkin or $wgDefaultMobileSkin which defaults to 'mobile'
• We introduce some sort of flag that marks a skin as mobile vs. desktop.
  • For now it'll probably have to be a $wg variable like: $wgSkinModes['mobile'] = array( 'desktop' => false, 'mobile' => true );
  • ((I think I already have an idea how I can fit that into the config setup for my skin rewrite))
• Special:Preferences gets keyed into skin modes and we add a new preference:
  • Our current 'skin' preference only lists skins that are desktop=>true
  • We add a new 'mobileskin' preference which lists skins that are mobile=>true allowing users to choose different mobile skins.