Modifying the way our wiki looks isn't limited to just changing the background color or the color of the text. Within MediaWiki, we have control over the page layout as well. In this section, we are going to cover how to go about customizing the existing layout by making changes to page sections and by moving them around the page. However, before we get into making changes, we have to understand the PHP file associated with the skins.
As stated earlier, when making changes to a skin, we need to look at the PHP file associated with the skin, not the skin.php
file. For instance, if we wish to make changes to the MonoBook skin, we need to make them in the MonoBook.php
file.
Let's start by taking a look at the MonoBook.php
file that can be found in the skins
directory. This is a large file so we will only look at a small part of it to get an understanding of its structure. The first part of the skin file contains the block of PHP code where the MonoBook skin class is created...