---
id: foreground
title: Foreground
summary: A responsive MediaWiki skin Garrick van Buren built with my input in 2013, now maintained in Wikimedia’s code review.
collection: Historical projects
status: retired
url: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Foreground
started: 2013-05-21
topics:
  - mediawiki
  - semantic-mediawiki
sources:
  - kind: github
    repository: jthingelstad/foreground
    role: implementation
  - kind: github
    repository: wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-Foreground
    role: successor
  - kind: website
    url: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Foreground
    role: reference
connections: []
page: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/foreground/
---

# Foreground

A responsive MediaWiki skin Garrick van Buren built with my input in 2013, now maintained in Wikimedia’s code review.

Foreground is a MediaWiki skin that “focuses on putting your content in the foreground.” It is built on the Zurb Foundation framework, so a wiki can lay out pages with Foundation’s responsive grid instead of MediaWiki tables, and it has classes predefined for Semantic MediaWiki. Its demo wiki was [foreground.wikiwonders.net](https://web.archive.org/web/20130622044052/http://foreground.wikiwonders.net/wiki/Main_Page).

Garrick van Buren built Foreground for MediaWiki with my input. It was a project of WikiWonders, a MediaWiki project business I started but never got off the ground, and was first published under the WikiWonders name on GitHub, in a repository I created on May 21, 2013. I credited Foreground to Garrick in [One Year for WikiApiary](https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/12/22/one-year-for.html), and later called it the skin “[Garrick and I worked on](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/317/).” I worked on it for WikiApiary, where I collaborated extensively with Tom Hutchison ([Weekly Thing 30](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/30/)). I tagged [releases](https://github.com/jthingelstad/foreground/releases) 1.0 and 1.1 in 2014 and [upgraded it to Font Awesome 4.0.3](https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/02/09/upgraded-mediawiki-foregroundskin.html) that February; Hutchison published every release from 1.2.0 in 2015 to 2.4.0 in 2021.

In 2022 Wikimedia developers asked whether the skin was still maintained. I [agreed to archive my repository](https://github.com/jthingelstad/foreground/issues/398) so it could move “into a more maintained status,” noting that it “got its start years ago from” Garrick and that Hutchison “has done all the recent maintaining.” Foreground now lives in Wikimedia’s Gerrit, mirrored at [wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-Foreground](https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-Foreground), and [MediaWiki.org](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Foreground) lists Garrick van Buren, Jamie Thingelstad, and Tom Hutchison as its authors.