CSS and Image Files

You will need to create a new directory in the skins directory, such as skins/yourskinname/, within your MediaWiki installation directory, where yourskinname is the name of your new MediaWiki skin.

To keep things simple, we will call our new skin jazzmeet, and store it in the skins/jazzmeet/ directory. The primary Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file for each skin is usually in this skin directory and is known as main.css. But it can be changed in the header of your skin's PHP template. For example, the CSS file for our new skin should be located at skins/jazzmeet/main.css within our wiki's installation directory.

shared.css in skins/common/ contains styles that are used by all of the skins. We can easily ignore this, as we can overwrite any unwanted style in main.css.

PHP Template

We need to carry out the following steps before we can start skinning MediaWiki:

$this->skinname = 'yourskinname'; $this->stylename = 'yourskinname'; $this->template = 'YourSkinNameTemplate';

Be sure to replace your skin name with the directory's name (for example, $this->skinname = 'jazzmeet'), and YourSkinName with the name of your new skin as it is in the PHP filename.