Mediawiki Skins Design – Review

As part of a book I’m working on I’m writing a chapter on open source wikis. The one I’m most familiar with is MediaWiki. It is what UH used when we first put wikis in place 2 years ago. Customizing MediaWiki wasn’t always the easiest task and we took the easy route of just putting our logo in the top left corner. Recently though I had the chance to read a book entitled “MediaWiki Skins Design” which made me wish I had such a resource available when I was trying to customize our wikis.

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.