Skins break on major version upgrade

[Aaron Wells]

One problem with the Mahara skins feature, is that it is highly dependent on modifying the underlying theme, and templates. And these both change, sometimes radically, from one major version of Mahara to the next.

This means that skins will break when you do a major version upgrade (unless the skin author edits the skin to be compatible with the new version). And that could provide quite a disincentive for people to upgrade their Mahara site.

I'm not sure what the best solution for this problem is, so I'm opening this bug partly to discuss the issue.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

I think any fix for this is probably going to involve adding a Mahara version compatibility number to the skin itself. At the simplest, you could add the version to the skin when you create it. Then, on an upgrade, you would either hide the obsolete skins, or put a warning flag or something on them.

[Gregor Anželj (gregor-anzelj)]

If my memory serves correctly then skins (if we dont take the "Advanced" tab into consideration) are only dependant on some small subset of CSS classes. How often do these CSS class names change?

Introductiong version compatibility number is definitely one way to go, but what to do next during the upgrade process is a bit blurred at the moment - might be a good thing to talk about in the DEV meeting...

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Gregor,

That's a good point. The CSS identifiers don't change that often.

Though they do occasionally change. In Mahara 15.04 we're rewriting the whole front end to use the Bootstrap CSS framework, so there may well be some big changes coming. Perhaps what we should do, is add additional classes specifically as a "handle" for skins?

But yeah, this might be useful to discuss at the next dev meeting. I'll add it to the agenda.

Cheers,
Aaron