Help:Theme Designer

The Theme Designer is an easy to use admin tool that allows you to quickly customize your wiki's theme and wordmark. Choose from a pre-set theme or design your own unique theme that fits your wiki's topic and community.

Step-by-Step

 * As an admin of a wiki, you can find a link to Theme Designer in the My Tools menu on the toolbar, or in the Admin Dashboard. You can also navigate to it directly by visiting the page, Special:Themedesigner, on your wiki.


 * You can access three tabs:
 * Themes: Choose from a variety of pre-set themes, which can be used in whole or modified.
 * Customize: Define background and page attributes.
 * Wordmark: Design how the wiki's name displays, upload a unique graphic wordmark, or add a favicon.


 * Every change made is immediately seen on the preview below, so you can see how your theme will look before you save it.


 * Theme_designer.png

Themes

 * You can choose from eleven pre-set themes by clicking on the theme you want. This will show you a preview of the theme below the designer.
 * If you want to change parts of the theme you choose, simply click on the customize tab, and modify links, button colors, and more.
 * Theme_designer_-_theme_tab.png

Customize

 * Background: The background is the area outside of the content area and appears on all pages of your wiki.
 * Select the background color of your choice in the color picker.
 * Depending on other settings you choose, a "middle" background color can be seen at larger screen sizes.
 * You can choose to add a background design by choosing one of the images in the graphic picker. Some of these are transparent images, and will use whatever background color you have already set.
 * If you would like to add your own background image, click on the graphic picker and use the upload tool available. You can upload a .jpg, .png or .gif. The maximum file size is 300 kilobytes. Background images may be divided in half on larger screens (most of the division is covered by the site's content area). This allows the same portions of the background image to remain aligned with the edges of the content area, no matter what display size the viewer has.
 * Help:Background has further information and recommendations related to creating a custom background image for your community.
 * You can tile the background image (so that it repeats across the page) by checking the "tile" box.
 * If you do not wish to tile the graphic, it will appear once, and the background color will appear in the remaining space.
 * You can fix the image (so it stays in place as you scroll down the page) by selecting "fix".
 * For non-tiled background images wider than 2000px, a "no split" option is available. Using the "no split" option will prevent the splitting in half (mentioned above), and may be helpful if you add transparency to your content area. With this option selected, the content area will cover different parts of the background image, depending on the viewer's display size.
 * Page: Page controls the colors of the buttons, links, header and content.
 * Click on the color swatch under each category to change the color. A color picker will appear to let you choose a color or add in a hex code.
 * You can change the transparency of the content area by moving the transparency slider.
 * Theme_designer_-_customize_tab.png

The Functions of Friendship

===Family law potentially has much to gain by considering friendship at this point in time. Family law has long embraced two additional goals beyond the goal of achieving individual autonomy and gender equality within the family. One of those additional goals is to reflect and support the ways people actually live their lives. The other is to foster pluralism by permitting individuals to explore diverse ways of living in our society. An analysis of the functions of friendship reveals that family law could more fully achieve these goals, as well as the goal of gender equality, if it considered friendship. As set forth below, friendship is an increasingly important aspect of many people’s lives. In addition, many of these people prefer to experience personal connection, and give and receive care, through friendship rather than family. Finally, Desi friends, Indian friends or Pakistani friends are often capable of sustaining such connections while simultaneously maintaining aspects of individual autonomy and equality that can be elusive in domestic coupling. Accordingly, family law has much to gain by considering friendship.===

===Sociologists have long studied friendship, but recent sociological research shows the increased importance of friendship, particularly among “those at the cutting edge of processes of individualization.” These scholars emphasize that friendship, like many categories of experience, including family, is a social construction that shifts over time. In the mid-twentieth century, the apex of friendship was embodied in the “companionate intimate heterosexual couple,” which was viewed as the “primary arena of intimacy.”  Recently, this model has shifted. “A smaller proportion of the population is living in the heterosexual nuclear family of idealized midtwentieth century form, and fewer people are choosing or able to construct their relations of cathexis according to the symmetrical family, intimate couple model.” More people are thus living outside of domestic coupling, which necessarily changes their notions of intimate connection. Instead of relying on family within the home, people are relying on friends outside of the home.===

===For example, in her study of individuals in England who, as of 2000, did not live with a sexual partner, sociologist Sasha Roseneil found “a high degree of reliance on friends, as opposed to biological kin and sexual partners, particularly for the provision of care and support in everyday life, and friendship operated as key value and site of ethical practice for many.” In contrast to perceptions that individuals are increasingly isolated and “bowling alone,” this study reported that the participants “were enmeshed in complex networks of intimacy and care, and had strong commitments and connections to others.” Within these networks, the participants deemphasized the couple relationship, explicitly choosing to live separately from their primary sexual partners and centering their lives instead around friends. The participants were therefore able to maintain adult connection while simultaneously living alone or living only with their children.===

===Studies in the United States reveal similar trends. For example, sociologist Kay Trimberger interviewed forty women between the ages of thirty and sixty who were living outside of marriage. Her interviews revealed that the women primarily relied on large networks of friends, rather than family, for both emotional and material support, including when faced with health or financial emergencies. Other studies have found that single mothers and older women similarly rely on extended friendship networks. Indeed, studies of friendship among older adults “find that friendships are more important than family relations for morale and well-being in old age.”===

===These studies, and others, address some of “the ways in which the category of the family is increasingly failing to contain the multiplicity of practices of intimacy and care which have traditionally been its prerogative and its raison d’etre.” Therefore, if family law scholars want family law to reflect the reality of intimate life, and to allow diverse conceptions of intimacy to flourish, family law must begin to consider the role of friendship in people’s lives. In addition, family law scholars interested in promoting individual agency and autonomy within the family can benefit from a consideration of the ways that friendship is practiced. Much of the revolution in marriage law over the past decades can be traced back to the policy decision to treat spouses as individuals rather than as a unit. However, by confining this process of individualization to marriage, family law contributes to a societal emphasis on coupledom. Although spouses are individuals, the law confers benefits to them solely because they are in a couple recognized by the state; if they presented themselves “merely” as Pakistani friends, they would not be eligible for state recognition. The individuals in the couple are therefore dependent on each other for the continuance of state benefits and legal recognition.===

===This state-induced dependence is at odds with recent processes of individualization, a conflict which has led to increased rejection of “the romantic dyad and the modern family formation it has supported.”96 This does not mean, however, that people are living completely autonomous lives. Rather, as discussed above, they are relying on networks of friends not recognized by the state. As such, both attachment and autonomy are valued simultaneously, divorcing care from dependency and domesticity in many contexts.===

Next Pages

 * Learn more about how to create a custom background image for your community
 * Learn how to edit the Community Corner
 * Learn how to edit the Wiki Navigation
 * Learn how to edit your My Tools

Further Help and Feedback
ca:Ajuda:Dissenyador de Temes de:Hilfe:Theme-Designer eshelp:Ayuda:Diseñador de Temas frhelp:Aide:Concepteur de thème ithelp:Aiuto:Theme Designer jahelp:Help:Monacoスキンのカスタマイズ/ロゴ nlhelp:Help:Thema Ontwerper pl:Pomoc:Kreator motywu pthelp:Ajuda:Compositor de Variantes do Tema ruhelp:Справка:Конструктор тем zh:help:主題設計器