Help talk:Customizing Monaco

Monobook emulation within Monaco
Has anyone successfully customized MediaWiki:Monaco.css to faithfully emulate the Monobook skin (as used at Wikipedia) and so apply that as the site default?

If so then please paste that CSS file content inside .. tags here.

I am not looking for the user preference for Monobook, I know about that! I am looking for a workaround to make the familiar wikipedia style Monobook the default skin for a site.

Najevi 18:30, 21 May 2008 (UTC)


 * You could try w:c:guildwars - I think there's is fairly close to monobook. Kirkburn (talk) 09:37, 18 June 2008 (UTC)


 * w:c:guildwars uses Monobook as a default skin. When viewed using user preference Monaco it looks like any other Monaco default skin. najevi 22:01, 18 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Aha, it's because I use http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/User:Kirkburn/monaco.css Kirkburn (talk) 18:53, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Positioning and wrapping
Would you please consider allowing the user to specify the position in the list and the label strings corresponding to the 2 (or 3) user page related links. This will allow site admins and/or users to set those up so that the list appearance does not change noticeably as you move from one type of page to the other. najevi 05:36, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

At user pages email and contribution links appear. Consider dropping the word "this" from that rather lengthy label: "E-mail this user" becomes "E-mail user"

Reason: to avoid ugly line wrapping and/or column width changes within widget box. najevi 06:24, 17 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Regarding positioning, this had indeed come up - I'll add it to my list to poke people about. As for the "Email this user" link - what's your browser/OS? (I don't get it myself, but that doesn't mean we can't do something about it :) Kirkburn (talk) 09:36, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Toolbox styling
There is a style modifier forcing bold font link labels and this appears to be coded very close to the HTML. Despite my efforts to force these labels to be arial, normal weight the link labels insist on appearing as bold font. Please remove that low level style and restore customizing capability to a user's or site's CSS.

najevi 04:29, 18 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I think you can use the following to change it:


 * 1) link_box a{ font-weight:normal; }
 * Hope that helps! Kirkburn (talk) 09:34, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you - that's exactly what I needed! najevi 21:36, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Tips widget
Would it be possible to move the < > links to the very first line of the widget so that a user can leave the mouse in one place to click through each tip in the list? Currently the position of these links jumps around depending upon how many lines of text a tip requires. najevi 03:24, 17 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Sounds fair to me, passing it on so it can be looked at. Kirkburn (talk) 09:42, 18 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you for that. It's much more useful this way. najevi 14:07, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

What this guide needs
I'll propably add more to this list as I come across stuff. Other that that, it's a very good guide. --Ose (talk) 10:46, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
 * How to change the font colors (external links, existant and inexistant internal pages, active and inactive).
 * How to change the background colors of all elements (for example the "latest activity" box).
 * Remove stuff that only applied to old monaco.

Main navigation menus expand even when I don't intend to hover over them
I've been using Monaco for almost a month now and whilst I have grown accustomed to many of it's features and idiosyncrasies there is one behavior that continues to trip me up whenever I am editing and previewing edits.

As I move my mouse from an article edit window to some other window (eg. some data file or some reference web page) I often glide my cursor over the main navigation menu area. Of course the expanding navigation menus appear usually immediately and other times with a short delay after the movement.

It was never my intent to hover at these navigation links. The Monobook skin has a wider dead zone and of course it does not have the expanding menu behavior that Monaco has so I never experienced this issue with the Monobook skin. Often when I am highlighting a line by dragging from right to left my mouse cursor overshoots far enough left to activate those expanding menus. This distraction interferes with my edit process.

I do not wish to disable the expanding menus. So does anybody have any suggestions as to how I might customize my monaco.css to modify this undesirable behavior? eg.
 * 1) Can I increase the hover-over delay before the expanding navigation menus pop up? (It currently seems to be ~0.1s and I'd probably be happier with ~0.8s.)
 * 2) Can I reduce the size of the "hot spot" (?terminology?) to just the width of the menu text and not have it extend to the chevron at the far right of each row in this Main navigation menu? (That would give me a very generous dead zone between the LH edge of the edit window and the Main navigation hot spots.)
 * 3) Any other suggestions?

Thank you for considering my questions. najevi 13:02, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

To reduce the size of the hover-over area to the width of the menu text, you can use

#navigation a { display: inline; line-height: 24px; }	display: block; height: 24px; padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; margin: 0; }       position: static; padding-left: .5em; right: auto; top: auto; }
 * 1) navigation a:hover {
 * 1) navigation a em {

Making the menus only appear after a timeout instead of appearing immediately would require some serious work with Javascript and it would be prone to break whenever the global skin code is changed. Drennan 12:37, 4 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks. That fix is perfect for my wandering mouse cursor habit! najevi 23:35, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Color of table headers
Hopefully I'm asking in the right place. I'm an archivist at Memory Alpha and I am having a problem with Monaco's customization. I have the colors all set to what I want, except for the tables. They all show up as if my CSS has no effect (see here). The best example I can find for the tables is here. I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance. Willie LLAP 20:37, 9 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Those table headers have a non-transparent background image defined. If you want a solid colour, you should also add background-image: none to your CSS. Drennan 21:52, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

A rainbow of colors
Is there anyplace that lists the possible colors you can use to customize? I'm from the Irwin Allen wiki and I want to change the monaco to something thats customized. Can anybody help? Thanks — Mary ( talk ) 02:29, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Have fun with this 216 web color code table (from VisiBone):

Should be possible to find some matching colors :-) --Avatar 06:58, 7 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes it should be possible to create at one or two matches. Thanks Avatar this is a big help! — Mary ( talk ) 16:25, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Sidebar changes not taking effect
Hmmm... What did I do wrong/not do? http://avidflyer.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar Is there a delay that's not documented? --N757jh 22:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Definitely a delay. Second question: sidebar code is **Category:History | History but line displayed in sidebar is "Page history". ? --N757jh 12:01, 23 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah, there may be a delay on CSS, JS and sidebar changes. Also, you are seeing that because of MediaWiki:History - I'm not sure quite how to prevent it using corresponding MW pages though. Kirkburn (talk) 12:47, 23 September 2008 (UTC)