Problems when upgrading to Chameleon 3.2 or later

[patrickfl]

Hello all,

a very specific question, but I hope that at least someone is able to help me in fixing a problem which is stopping me to update Chameleon to newer versions.

I'm not that familiar with Mediawiki Skins and I have taken over a customized chameleon skin for our public photo project (one year ago I migrated the skin from chameleon 2 to 3).

On https://github.com/patrickfl/RottweilSkin you can find the source code for an overloaded chameleon skin which is adding some special components for navigation.

This adapted skin is running smooth with MediaWiki 1.35.6 and chameleon 3.1. ("mediawiki/chameleon-skin": "3.1", "scssphp/scssphp": "1.4.1", "mediawiki/bootstrap": "4.5.0").

As soon as I'm updating any of the package versions mentioned before, the skin is getting messed up (font, layout, the colors are still ok) but I do not really know why.

I think it has something to do with the scss stuff or how the resources are loaded: https://github.com/patrickfl/RottweilSkin/blob/main/skin.json or https://github.com/patrickfl/RottweilSkin/blob/main/src/SkinRottweilSkin.php

Any ideas or hints are really, really welcome.

Thanks a lot.

[malberts]

As soon as I'm updating any of the package versions mentioned before, the skin is getting messed up (font, layout, the colors are still ok)

Can you explain what gets messed up? Do you get PHP errors? Does it look like some styling is not loading? Are your custom components not working?

First thing I would do is check if there are any SCSS compilation errors. Load any page in debug mode by adding ?debug=true to the URL. Then find the CSS network resources in your browser's developer tools. Example:

If there is a compilation error it will show the error message in the CSS payload. However, if the font, layout and colors look fine then it's probably not a compilation error.

[patrickfl]

I think I found a solution for my problem, but do not really understand why this is necessary for MW 1.35.x

I added a workaround code from the Template Class

chameleon/src/Chameleon.php

Line 130 in 5f47a76

public function initPage( OutputPage $out ) {

and added it to my skin (adaption of the version check)
patrickfl/RottweilSkin@main...chameleon-skin->-3.1

Now my skin is working properly again.

Any ideas why this is needed?

[malberts]

This was a bit before I got involved with Chameleon, but it looks like this change to handle some deprecations:
40a60c9

[patrickfl]

So, if I‘m on the right track I will need something similar like this part of code?

40a60c9#diff-8d51c613e5b21ebc1ff66a306188a1c584d8c9f97046bf4db9f39f98cb26bef7

[malberts]

I'm not 100% sure, unfortunately. All of that is specifically about Chameleon as a standalone skin. I've only looked at subclassing a Chameleon skin once a very long time ago. So I'm not sure how much you need to override versus reimplement. For example, if you actually need to run the code in that hook, but tailored to your skin, then you would need to register the new hook yourself.

This doesn't solve your problem, but it might be worthwhile to consider if you really need to subclass the skin. I didn't look at everything you did, but It's possible to have custom components in an extension that are available for use in a custom layout. In this way you are still using upstream Chameleon as is, but you can do custom things. I have a very minimal example here: https://github.com/ProfessionalWiki/ChameleonComponentsExample

[patrickfl]

Thanks a lot.

Adding our components as you have described in your example is for sure more easy to maintain.
I will definitely consider this as a solution for the next skin update.