Skinning MedaWiki

We use MediaWiki for the X-Plane Wiki, which is meant to be a collection of online documentation for tech support, third party editing, etc.

After pinging some users on my blog, the consensus seemed to be that while some people liked the interactivity of a Wiki, the usability of the site wasn't as good as "normal" doc websites (e.g. made with HTML, php, and some CSS).  I can see why they said that - the regular Wiki monobook has a lot of navigation space dedicated to "wiki-like" activities (e.g. editing and maintaining) and very little dedicated to search and navigation.

After looking at my own php rolled for the scenery site and MediaWiki, it became clear that it would be easier to make MediaWiki pretty than to make my php interactive.  So I built a new skin.  This is what I learned (the hard way):

• In hindsight, using Monobook as a starting point was really, really stupid.  My goal was a very different layout from MonoBook, so I probably could have saved time by starting with a simpler skin.
• On the other hand, MonoBook's php does output layout elements in a relatively clear way, so if you need to move things around on screen by changing the document hierarchy (as opposed to using a ton of CSS) it might be easier to start with MonoBook and move sections around.
• Probably the smartest thing I could have done would have been to delete the whole style sheet and define every DIV block as having a border, padding and margin, so I could visualize the document layout.  What I did instead (slowly beat the style sheet into submission) took a lot longer.

Here are the old and new layouts.  The main ideas were:

• Eliminate the side bar.  Important side bar items like search and the wiki name go up top; less important side bar items go to the bottom.
• Use less styling - monobook has a ton of horizontal rules and borders all over the place. X-Plane Wiki content is often complex enough that readers don't need eye distractions. Most of the page is dedicated to document content.
• Category breadcrumbs are enabled, and moved to the top, with much smaller style-sheet elements.  This provides "hierarchical" navigation (assuming the Wiki's category system is maintained).

The next step will be to redo the main portal pages (particularly main_page, which was never properly built) to give users a clear idea of where they need to go.