Help:Customizing your wiki

Welcome to the wiki configuration guide. This guide serves as a resource so that wiki administrators can better customize the software used on their wiki. If you created the wiki, you will automatically have the rights needed to customize the site to your liking, as described here.

Whenever you create or edit one of the pages on this list you should probably consider protecting it, as vandalism to many of these could result in severe changes to the wiki's environment that would be instantly visible and affect all users. However, all pages in the MediaWiki namespace are automatically protected by the software. All MediaWiki messages can be found at Special:AllMessages.

Sidebar
The sidebar at the left side of the page is fully customizable. The navigation is broken into two sections: the Main Navigation, which is the multi-level list you can hover over, and the two-column Link Toolbox.

There are two MediaWiki pages which tell the sidebar what to display, one for the first section, and another for the second.


 * MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar: affects the top half of the sidebar.
 * MediaWiki:Monaco-toolbox: affects the two-column display at the bottom.

See Help:Sidebar for the syntax used for each page.

Page title
The page title contains the text that is shown in the title bar of your internet browser and on search results. The contents of the two MediaWiki pages become the contents of the   tags in the raw HTML.

Your page rank is partly based on what's in the title bar at the top of the page. So if you want your wiki to show up when people search for "charles dickens", then "Charles Dickens Wiki" is a better title than "Scroogepedia".

Search for your topic's name on Google, and you'll see that the top ten results almost always have that phrase in the page title. That's where you want to be.

There are two pages that need to be edited to change the wiki's page title.


 * MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage affects only the page title for the mainpage.
 * MediaWiki:Pagetitle affects the page title for every other page on the wiki.

See Help:Pagetitle for more information.

Site Description
The contents of MediaWiki:Description will be placed inside the content of the  tag of the main page of a wiki. That description should be shown on search engines when the main page appears in the results. It is important that the description is 150 characters or less (including spaces).

See Help:Description for more information.

Site Logo
The large image at the top left of every page can be changed to be any other .png file by uploading a new version to File:Wiki.png on the wiki. You may need to do a hard-refresh (Ctrl+F5 / Ctrl-Shift-R on Firefox, Ctrl+F5 in Internet Explorer) before you will see the change.

See Help:Logo for more information and for the specifications of the logo.

Favicon (Favorites Icon)
The favicon (the small icon displayed next to the URL in the browser and next to the sitename in browser tabs) is located at. You may need to click the link through to the icon and do a hard-refresh (Ctrl+F5 / Ctrl-Shift-R on Firefox, Ctrl+F5 in Internet Explorer) before you will see the change. The favicon is known to be cached very badly by browsers, so if it doesn't reflect your change right away, give it a day or two, or try another computer.

See Help:Favicon for more information.

The skin and layout
An administrator can change the default theme of their wiki through bottom of the skin section of Special:Preferences. There are multiple themes that can be chosen to be used, and if none of them suit what the wiki wants, an administrator can create their own theme by selecting "Custom" in Special:Preferences and by creating it at MediaWiki:Monaco.css.

MediaWiki:Monaco.css is a CSS file editable by all administrators that affects all users on a wiki using the custom Monaco theme. It is important to note that the file is only used when the theme has changed to Monaco Custom.

See Help:Customizing Monaco for a thorough explanation of how to customize the skin.

Automatic welcome messages
The automated welcoming tool used at Wikia which welcomes users after they make their first edit is fully customizable. There are multiple messages that can be edited &mdash; all of which are listed and explained here. At User:Wikia there is a full explanation as well.

See Help:Welcome tool for more information and how to customize all the messages.

Site notice
MediaWiki:Sitenotice is a very useful tool that can be used to notify everyone about anything important. It is usually used for announcements. Whatever is placed in it will go above the page title and be displayed to all users (or just registered users if MediaWiki:Anonnotice is used) on every page of the wiki. It is important not to overuse the site notice.

See Help:Site notice for more information.

Anon notice
MediaWiki:Anonnotice is similar to the sitenotice, except is viewed only when logged out, while logged in users will only see the sitenotice. This might be helpful to new users to link to help pages or include reminders to register or login.

Text on the recent changes page
MediaWiki:Recentchangestext allows you to change the text that appears at the top of the Recent changes page. To do this, just create the page with only the text you want to appear at the top of Recent changes. The default text has links to various special pages.

Tagline
MediaWiki:Tagline allows you to change the text which can be enabled to appear under the article title (an example of this can be found here where it says From Avatar Wiki, the Avatar: The Last Airbender resource under the title.) By default, this text is not there. For complete instructions on how to customize the tagline for your wiki, please see Help:Tagline.