WikiQueer:Customisation

Customisation allows you, as an editor, to tailor WikiQueer pages to better suit your reading and editing style. Your customisation affects only how pages look in your web browser, not the reading or editing experience of other editors. Only registered editors can customise WikiQueer, and the customisation is visible only when an editor is logged in.

In addition, you can customise the way that your signature appears when you post a comment on a discussion page.

User name and signatures
Your username is displayed in the edit histories of all the articles you contribute to and is linked to your user and talk pages. You choose your name when you first register on WikiQueer and it is usual to stay with the same name throughout your time on the project, though it is possible to request a change of username.

You should always sign your posts on talk pages. Signatures are the text that appears before the timestamp when you put ~ on a page. Signatures are customised using "my preferences" under "User profile"; consider these guidelines when customising your signature.

You can use any wikitext as your signature (simply check the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box). If "Treat the above as wiki markup" is unchecked, the software treats this as your nickname and makes your signature " Nickname (talk) " which is rendered as:

Nickname (talk)

If something goes wrong and your signature stops working, see WikiQueer:How to fix your signature.

Preferences
The preferences link, visible to logged-in editors, allows you to change a large number of options. There are 11 tabs (User profile, Math, Editing, etc.), of which two merit further discussion - the "Skin" tab and the "Gadgets" tab.

Skins
A MediaWiki skin is a style of page display. There are differences in the HTML code the system produces (but probably not in the page body), and also different style sheets (CSS) are used.

The default is the Vector skin. There are a variety of user-made skins available for you to browse through.

The special page My Preferences offers a preview of the various skins for the Main page. This is not exactly interesting for typical articles, therefore here's a list of previews for this page:

To test other pages replace title=WikiQueer:Customisation in the URL. For legacy Web browsers not supporting CSS classic is apparently a good choice. For modern browsers the default vector offers a wide range of user customisations.

The dummy cell replaces the deleted useskin=amethyst by action=render.

Here's a table linking the raw CSS for various skins, see also Help:Mediawiki_CSS for the Common.css. As expected Myskin.css is empty, roll your own:

These pages are named after the skins. The personal skin file names must be written in all lower-case and without any spaces to work properly. (While the default skin files have the first letter in upper-case.)

&#160;

Placing selectskin on a page, adds links to switch between different skins easily. This is meant for test pages, but not for articles (or other pages in article namespace). Below the links created by the template:

Gadgets
The special page My Preferences has a "Gadgets" tab with a list of custom features you may enable for your account. These gadgets require JavaScript to be enabled in your browser. These tools are not part of the core MediaWiki software, and are generally developed and maintained by users on WikiQueer. Additional gadgets can be added by admins. The page Special:Gadgets shows the underlying user script(s) and/or CSS code used for each gadget.

Personal CSS
In addition to a personal JavaScript page, you can also have a personal page that uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to modify the appearance of WikiQueer pages. As with JavaScript, the name of the page that the MediaWiki software will use depends on the skin you're using; the default is vector.css. So, for example, editor XYZ could add personal CSS code to the page User:XYZ/vector.css.

As with user scripts, the Gadgets tab of "my preferences" (see above) may include a personal CSS modification that you're interested in; if so, you can simply check a box rather than editing your personal .css page.

Hiding specific messages
A common use of a user's css file, requiring direct editing, is hiding certain template messages. For example, you can hide Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Category (which appears when editing a category page) by adding


 *  #category-namespace-editnotice { display: none !important; } 

into Special:Mypage/skin.css, which identifies your current skin's CSS file (open in new tab/window to see). See WikiQueer:Skin.

Note: you need to track down the specific id the relevant message uses; in this example, the id is "category-namespace-editnotice". You may need to look at the wikitext of the message (e.g. the fmbox template, used to build many template messages, has two possible parameters you might see used, id and class). If you don't see it, try asking at the Helpdesk.