Hi Bill, Unfortunately, I think that there is a gap in the public documentation regarding this. I am in the same jam as you. The Redworks tutorial teaches us how to clone a skin to add CSS, but if I remember correctly it does nothing if we want to add actual content such as a custom header, footer, or sidebar. You can read my thoughts on the issue here: http://wikimedia.7.x6.nabble.com/MediaWiki-l-Cloning-Vector-to-modify-its-P… Part of me wonders if the reason that no one responded to it is that the people who could answer it prefer a more elegant approach. To me, though, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to clone a skin and the edit it's code. I'm more than happy to do the extra work when it is time to upgrade. Mediawiki is such a mature product that I can skip a lot of upgrades anyway. I think that the best approach is just to follow the directions in the following tutorial on a nonpublic installation of your wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning/Vector Just do experiments. I found that the html comments were helpful in identifying which sections of the code corresponded to which sections of the final html. I don't know if you've ever made a development server before, but it's only a couple hours of work to figure out. You just copy the filesystem to a new location, use mysqldump to clone the database, and then edit the appropriate files to point the code in the new filesystem toward the new mysql database. Forest Use Google technology to search 10,000 pages about TMS: search.tmswiki.org<http://Search.tmswiki.org> . Want to see what I'm working on? Click here<http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/3368/>8/>. (link fixed) On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Bill Traynor &lt;btraynor(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Sounds good, Bill, let's keep in touch. This email thread could serve as a resource for anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation. If we make any progress, perhaps one of us could add to the official documentation or at least include a link to this mailing list thread. Can any of the gurus on the list give us a starting point for how we can create a modified version of the Vector skin while still preserving the original as an option? Forest Use Google technology to search 10,000 pages about TMS: search.tmswiki.org<http://Search.tmswiki.org> . Want to see what I'm working on? Click here<http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/3368/>8/>. (link fixed) On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Bill Traynor &lt;btraynor(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Hi Bill, Many thanks for the update. I'd like to try to replicate what you did, but I'm not sure where to start. Did you use one of the following three tutorials? 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning/Vector 2. http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/28/mediawiki-subskin-tutorial/ 3. http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/ (which is the same as https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning/Tutorial ) Thanks again for the post. Forest On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 1:38 PM, Bill Traynor &lt;btraynor(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Thanks for the follow up, Bill. You wrote, I see how you can add CSS to screen.css by overriding the following method (taken from tutorial #2): function setupSkinUserCss( OutputPage $out ) { parent::setupSkinUserCss( $out ); $out->addModuleStyles( "skins.myskin" ); } But how do you add HTML? This is the primary challenge for us. Adding the ability to do this would, I think, substantially extend the power of Daniel's excellent tutorial. Would you be willing to share some of the code you use for adding custom HTML in myskin.skin.php? Best, Forest On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Bill Traynor &lt;btraynor(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 2014-02-11 9:32 AM, Forest S wrote: The HTML is controlled by the template, you can make a subclass of the template class that the skin you're based on uses and then define var $template in your skin. But the caveat in our current system is that if you want to make a minor change to the body you'll have to copy the entire execute method to modify it. Although if you just want to tweak one of the data params to the template you can do that with: function execute() { $this->data['...'] = ...; // ... return parent::execute(); } ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]