Forum:Can someone explain code?

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Hi there, i'm a new Wikia Admin and I'll get right to the point.

I have absolutely zero idea what the advanced coding on Wikia for theme design is. I've used the simple theme designer but that doesn't seem to be the extent of customization. I see words like mediawiki or common.css and was wondering if someone could explain these and point me in the direction of a tutorial? Kozakuu 14:59, January 4, 2012 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia's help page and w3schools are both excellent. The latter provides a thorough, step–by–step into CSS and has a number of examples, along with documentation of other languages used on Wikia. 15:51, January 4, 2012 (UTC)
 * CSS is Cascading Style Sheet. It is a programming way of making pages look nice without cluttering them up a lot, or making them lengthy and thus either slow to load or difficult to understand to not so advanced wikians.
 * Common.css is the place where CSS is used on the entire wiki. It is based per wiki. You can adjust the style, text effects (bold, normal, font family, background color and so on), add visual parts to your wiki and more.
 * Differentiating based on name you can also make the CSS be very personal and be specific to different layouts used throughout Wikia. Namely the Oasis skin (standard what you see here) or the Monobook (which is sort of like Wikipedia and can be set in your preferences).
 * You also got another fairly common used programming language called Javascript. Common.js is where it calls upon javascript. That language is capable of doing a lot of other, more action based things.


 * Mediawiki is the technology behind a wiki. It uses a lot of different parameters to make the wiki look good. All those parameters can be adjusted. From the way new people are greeted, to the looks of the front page, the color of your user page, the way the wiki is presented in search results and much, much more.
 * Wikia uses several hundreds of different pages which can all be adjusted. If you want to have anything specific changed, feel free to search the help pages, or ask here for guidance. The community loves to help you!