Topic on Manual talk:Skin autodiscovery

So I upgraded from 1.22.x to 1.23.5, which completely broke my entire wiki. The new skins functionality first warned about errors in skins, just as described in the upgrade log. I then attempted to correct this by adding the require_once text described in the manual skin talk page to the LocalSettings.php, which produced an endless long list of new errors I have no clue about. So I then tried to delete unnecessary skins except the one I use, no change there.

Then I tried excluding the part I didn't understand about pointing to the non-existing MySkin.php file, and instead in LocalSettings pointed to my own skins theme file. This didn't work, since I then got a ton of errors from the skin file and I have no idea how to modify this file to work.

So lastly I tried changing LocalSettings to point to Standard.php skin file, this still didn't work, so now the whole site is down, and I'll be trying to do a restore instead. That is of course a nice excercise but this while thing just once more reminds me that what I really should be doing instead of upgrading is migrating to WordPress.

I even tried to redownload the full 1.23.5 to extract just the MySkin.php file to use that, but it wasn't there so now I have completely lost myself in a maze of errors.

If only now I can get back to the previous version I believe I'll leave it there until I can migrate content. Security issues or not, upgrading seems to effectively kill the site which to me is worse than what any breach can achieve. Unfortunately I see no other way out of this right now.

Addition, while I've no idea how to get skins to work at least I've managed to reset the wiki to use the Standard skin, which while quite plain and lacking in style and desig at least allows me to access and start to migrate content rather than downgrade.

MySkin on this page is meant as a placeholder for the name of your skin, if you're using a custom one. If you're not using a custom one, you don't need to do anything. You can silence the error messages as somebody described in the thread above: Thread:Manual_talk:Skin_autodiscovery/Error_Message/reply_(3), but you'll still need to handle this before further upgrades.

A few days ago I have reworked the page and what it says now is exactly what I have done in order to update my skins for MediaWiki 1.24. What it told before contained a few errors and improprieties, but these are fixed now.

Note that the page tells you that you can split your skin file (in the examples always MySkin.php) into several files (which makes sense doing, because a skin file up to now always contained the main skin stuff, a skin class and a template class. Things are arranged more clearly if these are seperated!