All those who have emailed me with questions about designing a MediaWiki skin, take note. Now there is a book for you. Packt Publishing has released a book called MediaWiki Skins Design. With the consent of the publisher, I’m releasing a sample chapter (Chapter 8, Social Networking and MediaWiki) of the book here on Squirrel Tao. Clicking the link will bring up a pdf version of the chapter. Topics include how to embed Twitter and YouTube content and how to enable social bookmarking on your wiki.

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Two days ago, I accidentally wiped out all of my philosophy wiki content and users. As I was trying to troubleshoot some issuues people brought to my attention about the roundedblue skin, I realized I could not change the skin in my wiki. When I would try to change the skin in my preferences, I would get an error page. Some googling brought up three hits about other people reporting the same error, all of them experiencing the error for the first time after upgrading MediaWiki to version 1.9.3, as I had recently done. I could only find one response to these public pleas for help. This response was the suggestion to delete or rename LocalSettings.php and then go to the wiki’s index.php page and go through the same steps as if installing MediaWiki for the first time. After following these steps, it appears I’ve lost all my data. I did not write down the exact error message that started this whole mess, and I can’t find it again, even after over twenty minutes of googling for it. continue reading »

I’ve become overly obsessive about making MediaWiki skins or something, because this morning on impulse, I started making a new color scheme for the Rounded Blue MediaWiki skin I made yesterday. Once I had started, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop until I was finished, or else it would bug me. I had really intended to do other things today, but I can’t concentrate on anything else, anyway, now that I have become so obsessive about making skins the last couple of days. The good news is that I was able to change the color scheme of the Rounded Blue skin with very minimal effort. That should show readers how easy it is to customize a skin. Just change the colors in the image files, change the background color, change the background image or get rid of it, change the link colors and change the button and bullet colors if necessary. If necessary, adjust the positioning of the content area and the left column up or down, along with the p-cactions div tag. Voila, a new look. continue reading »

Today, using my own MediaWiki skin as the basis, I altered it to make it look like the Rounded Blue Edition WordPress theme. It is available for download. Click here to go to the download page and view a small thumbnail screenshot of the Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki skin.

To use it, just unzip it and upload it into your MediaWiki installation’s skins directory. The path to the stylesheet is relative: skins/roundedblue/main.css. Change the path if for some reason the stylesheet is not being applied. You’ll find the path in the roundedblue.php file, in the HTML head section, right underneath the title tag.

The Photoshop images that are used for the header background image, the rounded corner content boxes, etc. are available at itcouldbethisone.com for download. continue reading »

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a custom skin for the Living Philosophy Wiki. Now it has the same look and feel as the Squirrel Tao blog. Like the Squirrel Tao theme, it is based upon a customization of the Rounded V2 WordPress theme by Ghyslain Armand. In the process of customizing my wiki skin, I’ve also integrated the blog with the wiki, so that both share a navigation bar in common.

The First Stumbling Block – A Broken Stylesheet Link

I had started to create a custom skin several times in the past, using the instructions that can be found on the Jnana Base wiki, only to encounter a problem after Step 8. That is, I would make a copy of the default monobook skin and rename it. I would change “monobook” to my own skin name, everywhere the word “monobook” appeared within my own skin php file. I would upload my new skin and set my personal preference to use this skin. Voila, I would excitedly preview my work only to see completely unstyled HTML, all laid out in one single column, in Times New Roman, with huge H1 headings and the whole bit. It turned out that the link to the stylesheet was broken. continue reading »