Foreground
A responsive MediaWiki skin Garrick van Buren built with my input in 2013, now maintained in Wikimedia’s code review.
- Status
- Retired Deliberately ended.
- Dates
- Started May 21, 2013
- Where
- www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Foreground
- Topics
- MediaWiki Semantic MediaWiki
- Latest evidence
- Latest commit, Apr 1, 2026
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.
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, and later called it the skin “Garrick and I worked on.” I worked on it for WikiApiary, where I collaborated extensively with Tom Hutchison (Weekly Thing 30). I tagged releases 1.0 and 1.1 in 2014 and upgraded it to Font Awesome 4.0.3 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 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, and MediaWiki.org lists Garrick van Buren, Jamie Thingelstad, and Tom Hutchison as its authors.
Activity
423 commits (78 by me, 345 by others), the first on May 21, 2013.
The latest weeks with activity
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Week of Jul 25, 2022 1 commit by others
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Week of Jun 6, 2022 1 commit by others
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Week of Feb 8, 2021 5 commits, all by others
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Week of Dec 7, 2020 12 commits (2 by me, 10 by others)
All activity, week by week. Who made each commit is from its author and co-author lines.
Sources and evidence
Observed daily from GitHub, sitemaps, feeds, the Internet Archive, and Tinylytics. Evidence never sets a status.
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jthingelstad/foreground implementation archived on GitHub
A MediaWiki skin that focuses on putting your content in the foreground.
- Repository created May 21, 2013 (a development record, not a launch date)
- 137 stars and 57 forks on GitHub
- CSS, PHP, JavaScript
- Latest release v2.4.0, Feb 11, 2021
- Latest commit Jul 28, 2022; 0 commits on develop between Jul 20, 2026 and Oct 18, 2026
- Observed Oct 18, 2026
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wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-Foreground successor
Github mirror of "mediawiki/skins/Foreground" - our actual code is hosted with Gerrit (please see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access for contributing)
- Repository created Aug 5, 2022 (a development record, not a launch date)
- CSS, PHP, JavaScript
- Latest commit Apr 1, 2026; 0 commits on master between Jul 1, 2026 and Oct 23, 2026
- Observed Oct 23, 2026
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www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Foreground reference
Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.
Connections
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Filament grew out of Foreground
Filament’s repository history begins with Foreground’s first commits, and Garrick van Buren started the Pure version from that code in June 2013. Source
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WikiApiary is skinned with Foreground
WikiApiary’s distinctive look came from the Foreground skin, which I worked on for WikiApiary. Source
History
-
archive
Foreground moves to Wikimedia
I agree to archive my Foreground repository so Wikimedia volunteers can maintain the skin. Source
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milestone
Foreground 1.0
I tag the first release of the Foreground skin. Source
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milestone
One year of WikiApiary
A first-year retrospective describes the growing wiki community and credits Foreground as the site’s skin. Source