Short of writing a full skin, is there a recommended way to manipulate and/or replace the standard (Vector) MediaWiki header and footer?

What I'm specifically looking to do is manipulate the content at the very top and bottom of the page (aka frame the content), by manipulating the content and position of specific elements found in the body of the output (#main-header and #footer). The main header must have links to other related properties and the footer must have custom disclaimers, copyright lines etc.

I'd think a method to do so would be built-in somewhere. The addHTML() https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/OutputPage_8php_source.html#l01580 method of OutputPage https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:OutputPage.php just adds to what's already in mBodyText so that's not going to work. Similarly, prependHTML() and insertHeadItem() are not exactly suitable.

Do I need to write my own method that uses getHTML(), (modify), and setHTML()? Examples?

Greg Rundlett https://eQuality-Tech.com https://freephile.org