Many of you have become familiar with styling existing themes or creating new themes for open source content management systems such as Wordpress or Drupal. But an open market that not many have gotten into, but where there is no doubt much opportunity for growth is in the creation of MediaWiki skins! I don’t think I need to emphasize the power of MediaWiki and what it can do as many of you are already familiar with what it is. But today most MediaWiki installations are still using the same default theme with the only customization coming in the logo in the top left hand corner.

The fact is that MediaWiki skins can be styled up just like anything. It’s HTML & CSS with a little bit of PHP here and there. Learn your way through and you can make some pretty slick Wiki’s. Something you don’t see all too much of these days. But I will be one to admit that figuring out the “ins and outs” of a MediaWiki skin can be time consuming and confusing. Instead of wasting your time trying to figure out everything, I recommend getting the MediaWiki Skins Design manual from Packt Publishing!

At amazon you can spend $40 or so (sometimes they have discounts) and save your self hours by covering the step by step instructions inside this manual. You learn everything from creating your own MediaWiki skin from scratch too integrating 3rd party services into your Wiki Skin such as YouTube and Twitter to name just a few.

Chapter 5 – Useful MediaWiki Functions

After reading through the manual, I would have to say that the most helpful chapter for me was Chapter 5 which covers the various MediaWiki functions. Very similar to Wordpress, if you can learn the MediaWiki functions, therein lies the power with what you can do with Mediawiki. Highly recommended chapter. The book is worth purchasing just for that chapter alone in my opinion.