Initializing Your Skin
In order to view changes that have made to your skin's design, you need to make a few changes to MediaWiki. We need to inform MediaWiki that we want to view the wiki's content using a different skin from the default, that is, MonoBook.
CSS and Image Files
You will need to create a new directory in the skins directory, such as skins/yourskinname/, within your MediaWiki installation directory, where yourskinname is the name of your new MediaWiki skin.
To keep things simple, we will call our new skin jazzmeet, and store it in the skins/jazzmeet/ directory. The primary Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file for each skin is usually in this skin directory and is known as main.css. But it can be changed in the header of your skin's PHP template. For example, the CSS file for our new skin should be located at skins/jazzmeet/main.css within our wiki's installation directory.
shared.css in skins/common/ contains styles that are used by all of the skins. We can easily ignore this, as we can overwrite any unwanted style in main.css.
PHP Template
We need to carry out the following steps before we can start skinning MediaWiki:
- Create a PHP file named
YourSkinName.php. in theskins/directory. - Open this file and edit the line that reads-
class SkinMonoBook extends SkinTemplateto readclass YourSkinName extends SkinTemplate, but replaceYourSkinNamewith the name of your new skin. - Find the line that reads
class MonoBookTemplate extends QuickTemplate; to readclass YourSkinNameTemplate extends QuickTemplate; Again, replace YourSkinName with the name of your new skin. - Finally, you need to inform MediaWiki about your skin by inserting the following into the file:
$this->skinname = 'yourskinname'; $this->stylename = 'yourskinname'; $this->template = 'YourSkinNameTemplate';
Be sure to replace your skin name with the directory's name (for example, $this->skinname = 'jazzmeet'), and YourSkinName with the name of your new skin as it is in the PHP filename.