[thelist] wiki recommendation

April april at farstrider.org
Thu Nov 17 15:11:18 CST 2005


The skins on mediawiki are basically a series of nested php functions, 
which spit out html, which you can then adjust with CSS.  If you want to 
change the names of menu items on the page, what stats are spit out, 
whether the heading is a h1 or h2, etc., things get complicated, and I 
wouldn't recommend undertaking it on mediawiki without knowing PHP.  It 
doesn't help that the little documentation available is completely out 
of date, so you frequently end up reading code to figure out what 
database field needs to be changed...  Take a look at the source on 
wikipedia.org.  That should give you an idea of the "default" look. 
It's designed to be manipulated with CSS, so what you want might be 
entirely possible.  If you think you could apply a new stylesheet to 
that to get exactly what you want, then you're set.  My problems mostly 
came from needing to change elements that weren't completely a design 
issue, and were more of a content issue (IE needing different menus to 
appear based on whether someone was logged in or out and needing to 
stick a block of extra text at the bottom of the page).  Like I said, 
I'm not sure that any other wiki would be better about this, since I've 
only worked extensively with mediawiki.

Mike wrote:
> Thanks Robert, Paul, Hassan and April for your helpful advice. One 
> question for April:
> 
> April you indicated that it may be more difficult to alter the look of 
> the Mediawiki interface. Did you mean changing the html code? DO most 
> wikis allow you to change the html code? I do not like to use tables for 
> layout and prefer to layout structure with CSS instead. You see, I  feel 
> I am strong in CSS coding and so I feel I can change the look and feel 
> using CSS styles no problem and so maybe it doesn't matter too much if I 
> can't tamper with the html code. However maybe it would help if I could 
> alter the html code too. What do you think? I would like to be able to 
> alter the look of the wiki and so do you still think that maybe 
> Mediawiki isn't for me or would using CSS styling allow me to control 
> the look entirely or only partially?
> 
> (If I can't control the look entirely, I might use either phpwiki[1] or 
> taviwiki[2] instead - if they are any better at this control)
> 
> [1]http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/
> [2]http://tavi.sourceforge.net/
> 
> 
> April wrote:
> As long as you can live with the layout
> 
>>of one of the default skins, and do any color changing with styles, you 
>>should be fine.
> 
> 




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