MediaWiki/archive/customizing

Navigation

{{#lst:MediaWiki|navbar}}: customization

Links

• MediaWiki Customization at mediawiki.org

Articles

• /menus
• /new navbox
• /new Special page
• /outward-looking
• /searchbox
• /URLs

Related:

• extensions: custom coding using MW's built-in extensibility
• user-group security

Managed Customization

MediaWiki will include the contents of mediawiki:Common.css, if found, in the CSS code it uses for defining the appearance of its pages. (The initial character in "Common" does not seem to be case-sensitive, even if the site has the initial-caps flag turned off.)

Code Notes

(From Woozle 20:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT). Eventually to be given their own section, I expect.)

• Everything obviously starts with index.php.
• For the purpose of displaying a page (not saving changes or doing anything else), this calls $wgArticle->view(), in Article.php (line 699)
• $wgArticle->view() appears to be able to provide a few other formats besides the regular view (including difference engine and displaying redirections as subtitles), but I'm ignoring that for now
• $wgOut seems to be the object which accumulates text to be output, via various methods:
  • $wgOut->addWikiText(...)
  • $wgOut->addHTML(...)
  • $wgOut->addPrimaryWikiText() # Display content and save to parser cache
  • $wgOut->addWikiText() # Display content, don't attempt to save to parser cache
  • $wgOut->setPageTitle()
  • $wgOut->transformBuffer(); # Put link titles into the link cache
  • $wgOut->addMetaTags(); # Add link titles as META keywords
• ...and then it does these two lines:
  • $this->viewUpdates(); (found at line 1926 -- doesn't do much)
  • wfProfileOut( $fname );
• It's not clear whether the navbar has already been pulled in by the time we hit viewUpdates -- possibly transformBuffer does it? The comment makes it sound like that, but the name "transformBuffer" in that case is not very descriptive. The code in there should probably be examined.