I was in the same boat as you are currently only a few weeks ago. The wiki skins are based entirely on stylesheets, which is something I knew very little about. This means, that objects on the page are located based on the .css file where the class and id's are called out, rather than where they are positioned within the skin.php (monobook.php) file (to an extent). You can however develop a skin from the ground up as long as you take into account the required fields.
I started with the monobook skin and add a header. This can be done several ways. I chose to add a table around the entire skin, adding a left table cell, center table cell, and right table cell. The left and right table cells are used to "frame" the wiki. The center table cell houses the contents of the wiki.
To get a header, I inserted a table at the top of the center table cell and gave it dimensions required for my header (i.e. height="150"). There I put my site menu and logo.
I had to change the css for the tabs (labled p-cactions in the monobook skin) in order to located them below the header.
There are still a few bugs, but the skin is 99% complete. See it in action here: http://www.350z-tech.com/wiki
-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Koll Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 2:48 PM To: mattmozer@gmail.com; Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki
Am 06.09.2005 um 21:42 schrieb Matt Mozer:
I was wondering if anyone here has any experience or has any information on skinning wiki's. I am looking for perhaps some white papers and or a tutorial. I am surprised not to find more on the web on it since it is no easy task for those not already tempered with the daunting task.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Skins and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_user_styles
ciao, tom
-- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 http://www.tomk32.de
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Am 06.09.2005 um 22:00 schrieb Bass, Joshua L:
To get a header, I inserted a table at the top of the center table cell and gave it dimensions required for my header (i.e. height="150"). There I put my site menu and logo.
That's so 90ies.
Better solution (untested): give #logo position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; width: 100% use background-image in #logo to display your image. for the three menus, put them into the sidebar where the should be and use position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; to position them. make sure that #column-content and #column-one have a fitting margin-top
(found a nice hint for the margin: and padding: values : TRouBLe ;-)
ciao, tom -- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 http://www.tomk32.de
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