While skins may appear to be simply a novelty, they can allow us to make bugzilla more usable, and administrators to further custom configure Bugzilla to their needs. By skins here, I mean a set of templates that the user can select to use instead of the default templates. A col would be added to the profiles table to store the user's default skin. Several potential applications of this: 1. People with web-enabled phones/pagers/thingies (like Stuart with his danger hiptop who was complaining about this and made me file this in the first place) could use a simplified version of Bugzilla without extra banners and text that take up too much space on small devices. 2. Administrators can create different versions of the UI for different departments in their company and set a user's skin based on their group (setting a skin based on group is probably not going to be in this patch though, but it's an option and would be fairly simple to code). This way, external beta testers can get a simplified Bugzilla Helper-like interface without links to reports.cgi and mention of votes and assignees while developers can access a full advanced interface. There are endless other possibilities. I'm going to put some work into a patch, though I would imagine that there would be some criticism of this idea in general. cc'ing myk because of his interest in templates, and pavlov for wanting the dang thing in the first place.

Also, forgot something. Skins would allow users to select a language they want Bugzilla displayed in. Instead of picking en/default as their skin, they could select de/default or jp/default, or whatever else they want...

It is the consensus that we don't want to add more fields to the profile table. The skin idea is definitely something that I think could be very useful as well. And then we need themes.bugzilla.org :)

Alternative stylesheets plus cookies to remember (since Mozilla doesn't) would do for a primitive skinability without messing with the profiles. Simplistic sheet: display:none on most banners and stuff Funky stylesheet: some lizards in backgrounds and more colorful overall.

I disagree with the sentiment, so I think there is no such consensus. It doesn't make any sense to rule out adding columns to tables unless the table literally can't hold them. Columns should go into the tables that make the most sense from a schema design point of view, which in this case is probably the profiles table.

> I disagree with the sentiment, so I think there is no such consensus. I stand corrected. Then this does not necessarily depend on bug 98123, but I suppose it could potentially be helpful.

Correcting dependencies, since this does not truly block bug 53006 (which can be a global alternate format) or 173127 (which it is a duplicate of), and it doesn't depend on 98123 (although it relates to it). Also marking duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 173127 ***

clearing target on INVALID/WORKSFORME/WONTFIX/DUPLICATE so they'll show up as untriaged if they get reopened.