The donate skin looks nothing like Vector, yet is Vector running all its CSS and JS.
It loads 9kb of css and 150kb of JS despite being an incredibly simplistic page.
It strikes me that a bespoke skin would be much more lightweight leading to a faster page load leading to more donations.
Assuming Fundraising tech maintain this. Higher performance could equal more donations...
We do something similar for ContentTranslation in case you need an example of how this would work in practice. https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-ContentTranslation/blob/master/extension.json#L32
The skin itself would be pretty easy to maintain if made mostly with templates:
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-ContentTranslation/tree/master/skin
:)
@Ejegg @AKanji-WMF See discussion in Slack here https://wikimedia.slack.com/archives/C8W3HEHLG/p1711576458606369. It's probably worth at least thinking about this as part of "combo wiki"
Thanks @Pcoombe . Creating a custom skin sounds fun, and the faster load times might give a nice boost for donations!
I'm out next week but if no one gets round to looking at this next week I'd be happy to put up a proof of concept the week of 16th so we can run some performance benchmark testing on it. I do think we could make this page a lot more snappier and it would be extremely interesting to see what impact that has on donations.
@Jdlrobson Feel free to work on a proof of concept, but I can't guarantee Online Fundraising will have time to work on implementing this in the near future. We will also probably want to A/B test any changes for donation performance.
Change #1020408 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):
[mediawiki/extensions/FundraiserLandingPage@master] Introduce the Donate skin
Change #1020409 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):
[mediawiki/extensions/FundraiserLandingPage@master] POC: Potential styles
Hi @Pcoombe https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/FundraiserLandingPage/+/1020408 provides some scaffolding for a proof of concept. It would allow us to run synthetic tests which should be enough to gauge performance improvements of the new skin over the existing one. The follow up patch https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1020409 demonstrates how styles currently shipped on wiki could be moved to the skin proper (It's not clear to me how the styles there are added).
I am a bit concerned about keeping donate.wikimedia.org on Vector legacy skin in the current form given this seems like critical functionality and the Vector skin is no longer being actively maintained by the web team and since we don't have a good understanding of the donate skin architecture we can't guarantee the same sort of SLAs as we would for fixes as Vector 2022 so let's make sure we allocate time to address this as Essential-Work before the end of the year.
Does that make sense?