Customization policy

''As people move from one community to another, evolving from reader to editors to founders, it's important that they are able to take what they learn from one wiki and build on that. A key part of this learning experience is having the user interface and features be consistent. That's not to say there can't be customization and individuality, those are always important to a wikia, but the visitors should be able to rely on the interface and features being in expected places as they move around Wikia.''

To customize the view your visitors see, we recommend you use the theme designer. This helps you by automatically selecting text and shading colors based on your chosen scheme. You can also upload background images and a wordmark.

If you want to go further, then there is a CSS page for each community. This can be used to add formatting to tables and infoboxes, or to control the colors more specifically. It can also be used to add decoration, including borders and font changes to almost any part of the page. It should not be used to change the layout of the frame around the content, to remove, move or reformat the ads or Wikia bar, or to change the wiki's features and functionality.

It's also possible to change the wording of many aspects of the site via MediaWiki messages. However, we recommend care in doing this -- remember that if you rename the edit button to "Blah" no one will know what it does!

We encourage experienced users to modify the wiki for themselves rather than adding a high level of variability from the default for their users. You can do this by editing your personal CSS and JS pages -- in this space anything goes!

It's impossible to create an exhaustive list of "do's" and "don'ts" for CSS, there are so many variations! But there are some examples below to help show the key elements.

Examples:

Further help and feedback
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