MediaWiki Skins Design (Paperback)

In Detail

Wikis are a great way to collaborate and share knowledge online. MediaWiki is a popular and powerful wiki engine, powering some of the biggest wiki sites in the world - including Wikipedia, the biggest and most famous wiki of all.

If you have a MediaWiki-based site and want to tailor its appearance, then this book is for you. MediaWiki Skins Design shows you how to fully customize the appearance and interface of your MediaWiki-based wiki. You will learn how to change every aspect of your wikii's appearance to produce a MediaWiki site fully tailored to your requirements.

The book provides full details of how MediaWiki skins work, and the necessary template and CSS customizations required to completely alter MediaWiki's appearance. Using this book, you will learn to develop rich, attractive, and friendly skins for MediaWiki.

What you will learn from this book?

• Understand the architecture of a MediaWiki skin: how CSS, PHP, and image files work together to create a particular look.
• Customize all aspects of your wiki's appearance: the article display screens, the editing screens, the fonts, images, layout and colors.
• Integrate your wiki with services such as Twitter, YouTube, and features from your own website.
• Make your wiki more user-friendly: use interface design to encourage edits, make articles more readable, and make the wiki easier and more fun to use.
• Create print style sheets for your wiki, making it easy for users to get hard copies of wiki pages.
• Incorporate JavaScript and AJAX features into your MediaWiki skin, providing faster edits and greater usability.
• Ensure your skin is compatible with the major browsers, including the popular but badly behaved Internet Explorer.
• Deploy your skin to a live MediaWiki server, and see how to distribute it to other MediaWiki owners.
• Study existing MediaWiki skins, and find out why the default skins aren't great for your wiki.

Approach

This book takes you step by step through customizing your MediaWiki skin. It is full of practical examples of MediaWiki skinning techniques, and clear explanations of how MediaWiki skinning works.

The early chapters go through each element of a MediaWiki design, showing the CSS and PHP tags necessary to customize MediaWiki's appearance. Later chapters look at ways to further enhance your design using extra graphics, JavaScript, AJAX, dynamic CSS, and more.

Who this book is written for?

This book is aimed at web designers or wiki administrators who want to customize the look of MediaWiki with custom skins.

The reader will already have a MediaWiki installation that they are targeting with their skin. It might be their own installation, or they might be a designer developing a custom look for a client. The book does not cover setting up or using MediaWiki, except features specifically related to skinning.

The book assumes that you are familiar with CSS and HTML, but no prior knowledge of PHP is required.

Richard Carter

Richard Carter started as a freelance web designer working in Leicestershire during his gap year. After meeting his business partner at Durham University, he co-founded Peacock Carter, a Newcastle-based creative partnership specializing in web design and development and corporate identity.

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