Skin.doc (MediaWiki)

Contents
This document describes the overall architecture of MediaWiki's HTML rendering code as well as some history about the skin system. It is placed here rather than in comments in the code itself to help reduce the code size.

Version 1.4
MediaWiki still use the PHPTal skin system introduced in version 1.3 but some changes have been made to the file organisation. PHP class and PHPTal templates have been moved to /skins/ (respectivly from /includes/ and /templates/). This way skin designer and end user just stick to one directory. Two samples are provided to start with, one for PHPTal use (SkinPHPTal.sample) and one without (Skin.sample).

Version 1.3
The following might help a bit though. Firstly, there's Skin.php; this file will check various settings, and it contains a base class from which new skins can be derived. Before version 1.3, each skin had its own PHP file (with a sub-class to Skin) to generate the output. The files are:
 * SkinCologneBlue.php
 * SkinNostalgia.php
 * SkinStandard.php
 * SkinWikimediaWiki.php

If you want to change those skins, you have to edit these PHP files. Since 1.3 a new special skin file is available: SkinPHPTal.php. It makes use of the PHPTal template engine and allows you to separate code and layout of the pages. The default 1.3 skin is MonoBook and it uses the SkinPHPTAL class. To change the layout, just edit the PHPTal template (templates/xhtml_slim.pt) as well as the stylesheets (stylesheets/monobook/*).

pre 1.3 version
Unfortunately there isn't any documentation, and the code's in a bit of a mess right now during the transition from the old skin code to the new template-based skin code in 1.3.

Edit Log

 * 2005-06-13 Transcribed from docs for MediaWiki version 1.4.5