Forum:Revised Main Page & Skins

Customised Monobook skin
Thanks to Moviesign starting me off and pointing the way, I've steadily customised the Monobook skin for the FRW, for a consistent colour scheme. After much fiddling and hacking and checking out other wikis to see what they did and what I could borrow, I've finished it.

If you already use Monobook, you may see it in action now. If not, you may need to bypass your browser's cache to update, as explained at MediaWiki:Common.css, where the new code is kept. If you use another skin (Oasis, Mobile), then you can either change it in Preferences or try this link to see the Main Page.

I recommend switching to Monobook and going through long and short articles and editing to see how the new skin behaves and where the background image appears. To see the bare, default Monobook skin for comparison, go to My Preferences in Monobook.

I highly recommend this hack to let you switch skins with a single click via tabs. This won't work with edit windows however.

What you'll see in the customised Monobook skin is:


 * A background image (thanks Movie!), which we also have in the Oasis skin (a map of the Dalelands in 1479 that WotC released as wallpaper a few years ago). I need to revise and tweak this further, now that Wikia has some decent help on this at Help:Background. I aim to crop it for better focus on map details and give it an efficient alignment, and hopefully added some fading to meld with background colours.


 * An adjusted logo to fit in the top-left corner, thanks to Thomaslove92. I want to add our 2005 to 2015 dates for the anniversary year; I think I can do that myself after the background has been cleaned to remove the existing title.


 * Capitalised initial letters for headings and links throughout. Wikia liked lowercase, but I felt the caps were more professional and consistent.


 * For the left-side panels, a consistent colour scheme of faint parchment backgrounds, with black and sepia links (I always thought sepia was the faint brown/yellow of old parchment, but it's actually the red-brown ink used), leather brown headings with gold titles. I felt this gave a nice old-book feel.


 * For the top tabs in the main article viewing window, inactive tabs are greyed out. Mouse-over them, and they'll turn white.


 * Black outlines around viewing window, left-hand panels, and tabs, to give a nice definition to everything.


 * The personal links at the very top (user page, talk, preferences, etc.) were tricker to adjust. I found putting boxes around them made the top section far too crowded, and they sat too close to the letters. This area can be expanded, but I'm loathe to fiddle with the standard Wikia layout too much, and its a waste of space. A long box can be put across the screen, and links might be included here, but this is currently beyond me. So, right now, they float over the background image. I might bold them to help them stand out.

One option is to have rounded corners on the viewing window, tabs, and/or panels, as Wookiepedia does. I don't think it suits our scrolls-and-maps style, where paper has corners. It's a more of a technological style.

In future work, I'd like to revise the Main Page further. With the map in the margins, the brown filler on the page is no longer essential. I might remove it entirely and simply distribute the notices in the white space. I could try again to get the brown to fill to the margins, or perhaps replace it by the background image. That should yield more screen space.

I also hope to one day alter the links in the left-hand panels, to remove redundant ones and add more useful ones.

But right now... I just love this. It's beautiful. :D

— BadCatMan (talk) 01:29, October 16, 2015 (UTC)