Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #444670 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

About the Author
Richard Carter (http://www.EarlGreyAndBattenburg.co.uk ) 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 (http://www.peacockcarter.co.uk ), a Newcastle-based creative partnership specializing in web design and development and corporate identity.

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Customer Reviews

An Excellent Guide and the Only Book of Its Kind for the MediaWiki User Community
I wish I had this book when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my own wiki. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Nothing like this existed to my knowledge when I set out to make my skins. Documentation is often the weakest link in the open source community. This book fills an important gap that should democratize MediaWiki even more, making it more appealing to a wider swath of the web population.

The book follows my favorite format for a technical guide, taking the reader step by step through an example that resembles the kind of thing you'd want to do in real life. It breaks down everything thoroughly with plenty of pictures. Topics covered include not only CSS but also MediaWiki PHP functions that are integrated into a MediaWiki skin. As a bonus, there is information on adding on some of the latest widgets that Web 2.0 has to offer, from thickbox to twitter. To make your skin a real professional class act, you can even learn exactly how to use licensing and copyright options and exactly how to make your skin printer friendly. If you're going to be spending any time messing with MediaWiki skin design, and you're like me and don't have time to spend hours spinning your wheels, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book.

Good book on how to customize the look and feel of MediaWiki
This book is a terrific thorough overview of how to customize the layout, design, look and feel of a MediaWiki wiki. It provides an overview of "skins" and their purposes. Then delves deeply into the nitty gritty providing a detailed walkthrough of how to make MediaWiki look like an example site which he created. One of the things I like best about this book is that the author outlines which CSS classes control which elements within the template. This is extremely helpful because MediaWiki uses an overly complex stylesheet. He also outlines key functions which are part of the MediaWiki template. Using an understanding of these functions designers can move elements around on the page or eliminate them completely. The latter half of the book shifts focus to adding more attractive design elements, creating a dynamic UI, and adding media. The discussion of these topics is extremely helpful because most websites today have an engaging user interface and media-rich pages. The discussion of how to embed content from video sites such as YouTube, and social bookmarking sites such as Furl is particularly good. I was also happy to see a chapter on creating print stylesheets for MediaWiki. Many wikis are used for documentation purposes and without a good print stylesheet printing often can be a problem.

Overall, this is a great book for designers who want to customize the look and feel of MediaWiki, create a more dynamic user interface and add media. I wish I had it as a reference when I was working on MediaWiki and I'll certainly use tips from it in my MediaWiki sites in the future.