User:Renegade54/Skin

A skin is the style surrounding the content area. The content itself is not changed by the skin in which it appears, but the colors, design, and navigation of the page can be very different from one skin to another. Memory Alpha offers two default skins, as well as the option to customize your skin to fit your own preferences. The skin currently used in on Memory Alpha is called Monobook.

Personal choices
If you are logged in, you can change your own personal view of Memory Alpha pages by choosing your favorite skin in your preferences.

Choosing a skin under My Preferences
Click on your user name at the top of the screen, and select "My Preferences" from the dropdown menu.

Click on the second tab titled Skin under Preferences, and this brings up the Skin Chooser.

Monobook
Monobook, the default style of Wikipedia and many other MediaWiki sites, is also available as default, but does not support many of Wikia's new features. See Help:Customizing Monobook for more information.

Wiki Customized skins
Some communities spend a lot of time customizing their modern skins with custom menus, colors, and more. If your personal preferences are set differently from the site's default, especially if you use an older skin, you might miss out on some of the wiki's customization and features. Therefore, we recommend checking the box labeled "Let the admins override my skin choice" in Preferences. This checkbox is selected by default. You will need to uncheck it and you will only see your personal color theme for all wikis.

Below the See Custom Wikis checkbox, you will see which skin has been chosen by the admins for this wiki.

Admins
If you are a wiki admin (or founder), you have the ability to customize the wiki's design, color and functionality. To choose a preset standard, you can simply click on the down arrow and select which color theme you would like to apply wiki-wide under preferences, skins, admin options.

If you select Custom, you customize your wiki skin. Please refer to the Help:Customizing Monaco page to learn more about complete customizations.

How do I customize skins?
(CSS) code can be put in several places to alter how your wiki looks.

Specific design details can be customized on a particular wiki by editing MediaWiki:Common.css, which affects all users of the site, no matter what skin they are using. CSS placed in MediaWiki:Common.css is usually aimed at customizing the display of the content area, such as defining customizations for templates, not the navigation or colors belonging to a skin.

On Memory Alpha, multiple style sheets are combined in order to style what a user will see on any specific wiki. Memory Alpha has its own stylesheets applied which create both Monaco or Monobook, depending which you are viewing. Any CSS customizations you make will be layered on top of these files.

Memory Alpha's skin is named "Monaco", and MediaWiki:Monaco.css is the place where admins can add customizations. Admins can also customize stylesheets for Monobook by editing MediaWiki:Monobook.css, however very few users will actually see these customizations.

See also Help:Customizing Monaco and Help:Customizing Monobook for more information.

Can I customize my own view?
If you are logged in, you can change your own personal view of Memory Alpha pages by choosing your favorite skin in your preferences. See Help:Skin chooser for more details.

If you'd like even more control than that, you customize your view (without changing the look for everyone) by editing your user stylesheet to add CSS code to change the site's fonts, colors, and many other things. Edit User: /monaco.css to alter Monaco or edit User: /monobook.css for Monobook. Creating skins through this way is a great way to be able to test and play around with the colors, yet not affect anybody on the site. You can then transfer the final code to a sit-ewide file of course.

These stylesheets which are specific just for you take the highest precedence over all the other files loaded. What this means is that your stylesheet takes priority and overrides the others if they conflict.

For more information and ideas, see Help:User style. You can learn more about CSS options and syntax at one of the many CSS tutorial pages on the web.