ach wrote
When the original design has been implemented, you are free to open a pull request for any kind of homepage design.
OK. One interesting possibility is how those frontpages (shown on my pics) were made:
- just by removing pageId
- and making a background color of page's content transparent.
So a site background picture was revealed (not obstructed), and that gave a page some cool distinct look.
Then all the particular layout was made by means of wiki page editing (with WRAP div's and styling).
It means we could add just some CSS and (many) versions of frontpages' layout in a form of usual wiki pages, e.g. in [[:Playground]] or somewhere.
Then users could use or modify layouts that they like, with no changes in template core.
ach wrote
Keyboard users would not be able to access that sidebar.
If we like, that's possible to mend with javascript, adding both
- a small control element (like "drop-down the sidebar" ON FOCUS, "hide the sidebar" when focus is not inside it),
- hotkeys to open and to close a sidebar.
Another interesting idea is the option to use a pool of different background pictures.
For example, on my site I
- made those pictures cross-template, putting them into "/lib/images/bg"
- and naming them 01.jpg - 50.jpg
So a user could easily choose them by number (default e.g. in style.ini) and add her own pics.
Most of those great pics I took from
https://unsplash.com/ - a large collection of public domain photos - and compacted them by XnConvert.
PS. My collection of background pictures see here:
https://github.com/chang-zhao/background-pics/archive/master.zip