These are loose ideas and notes about a new theme for MoinMoin wiki, possibly also with a set of actions and other plugins necessary to handle changed interactions.
The "wiki system" part of the interface (bredcrumbs, paths, actions, bookmarks, editor, search, page metadata, links to system pages like RecentChanges and Help, login and user info, messages) should be strongly visually separated from the actual page content.
The whole page should be also clearly structured logically. I.e.: Viewing the page with CSS turned off should be self explaining (compare just Moin with http://de.wikipedia.org or http://www.webaim.org/). Elements should appear in a sensible order here and grouped within logical blocks. More structuring could be achived by using hidden text or hidden headings. Afterwards this design step, a visual design should be applied to this logical structure ("CSS"). In a whole: new WCAG 2.0 and ARIA 1.0 (and its role model) should be considered.
Having a skip link to jump to the main content is a must in WCAG 2.0, see http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G1.html (or have a look at http://de.wikipedia.org and the skip links "Wechseln zu: Navigation, Suche" or http://www.webaim.org/). This could also mean: Move the breadcrumbs navigation ("You are here: Page -> Subpage") as closely to the main content as possible and/or make it logically part of it (so that if you hit "skip to the main content" you get to the breadcrumbs which is directly followed by the main content).
The whole theme should be easily usable with the keyboard only. Accesskeys could help, see FeatureRequests/BasicAccesskeySupportInsteadOfBuiltInAccesskeys for a Javascript based solution.
- There should be place for user-provided navigation editable in the wiki (not in the configuration) and displayed on every page. Sidebar page from the Mandarin and Gugiel themes might do it. Maybe there should even be a second sidebar on the other side, or a block at the bottom of the page.
- I like this very much. Radomir, I liked all the themes you have done very much! Howver this certainly depends on the context of usage. Maybe a config var could help an admin turn this feature on or off. However I would like to see this feaure implemented.
- Search box should be visible at the top left of the page. Ideally, it should only have one button, but that may be too inefficient...
- Often you see solutions like this: You have a search box and just one search button. Underneath the search box there is a small link "advanced search". Hitting the search button perfoms a "full search" by default. The search menu is logically put in the right place in the page and visually moved to a user-friendly position by CSS.
- Edit link should be at the top of the page. There might be needed a second one at the bottom.
- Edit links a part of the action menu and are put logically in the right place of the page and are visually styled according to special needs.
- There should be unlimited space for user bookmarks -- the should scale from zero to dozens.
.. and the theme should still look compelling (which is quite hard to achieve)!
- Each time a link with page's title appears, it should display that page. Links with different purposes (looking for backlinks, selecting a page for action, etc.) should have different text.
? -> I would prefer a seperate action "Pages linking to this page" for that, see ActionMarket/backlink.py
- The list of actions should be broken down into logical groups. Many actions that can be accessed from different parts of the interface shouldn't appear on the list (there should be one obvious way to do it)
- At least there should be a way for an admin to easily tailor the action's menue (and the available actions) to the needs of his "customers". Some actions might be confusing for some people.
- Site logo and title belongs in the 'content' part of the screen, perhaps in the user-editable sidebar (so not part of the wiki system)