Our Case Study: JazzMeet

To provide a consistent example throughout this book, we will be skinning MediaWiki for JazzMeet, a wiki used to organise jazz festivals in the same way as BarCamp (http://www.barcamp.org) organises meetings to share knowledge. JazzMeet helps in organizing jazz music festivals in various cities across the world, and provides information on the bands and artists performing at each venue, as well as the time and place of every event. Take a look at the following screenshot:

The most noticeable thing about the AboutUs MediaWiki skin is that it doesn't really look like a wiki. The colors create a more welcoming atmosphere than MonoBook's, and whilst there are advertisements, they're generally restricted to the outer columns, well away from the primary content.

The advertisements underneath the page's title are more subtle than the other adverts, adopting the color scheme of the content. The log in and registration links are not as much of a focus, being at the right hand side of the screen, but are still large enough to attract visitors' attention.

A more careful look at AboutUs reveals the absence of the discussion pages seen on Wikipedia and other wikis. This lessens the number of links required on each page that aren't directly related to the page's content, allowing AboutUs to appear simpler than Wikipedia, in turn appearing more inviting to wiki novices.

The search feature presents itself as an 'obstacle' to visitors, inviting them to search for the content they're looking for, and the advertising in the right-hand column doesn't detract from the page's content, but the complementary colors used help to make them feel as if they were organic content, rather than a way to generate income for the website.

Another innovation of the AboutUs wiki - which sadly can't be achieved with skinning - is that following a link to an article which does not exist creates the basis of an article on your behalf, locating the domain name's title, and a description extracted from the website.