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The Skin Fiasco

24 October 2004

I originally posted this onto my user page on Wikipedia

I happened to be exploring the Wikimedia website when I came across this page which had some pretty good information on how to customize themes. I went ahead and downloaded the monobook.css file before proceeding to tinker with the background and border colours, making everything orange. I copied this new style sheet into my '/mytheme.css' page. I then went to preferences and set my theme to 'mytheme'.

Didn't Work.

All I got was this terrible theme which looked nothing like anything that I'd seen on Wikipedia before. Therefore, I put the style sheet instead into the '/monobook.css' page. I then set my theme to monobook.

My orange theme worked quite well.

Well, almost...

The problem was that whenever I viewed a user page (the normal subject pages worked fine), the tabs, user settings, Wikipedia logo and the tools down the left hand side had disappeared completely.

I wasn't happy about this.

So, I changed my preferences to the classic skin and, using this skin, managed to erase the contents of the '/monobook.css' page. I changed the preferences back to monobook and, to my horror, I still had my bright orange, dosn't-work-on-userpages skin.

So, then I tried going to the '/monobook.css' page and I pasted in text copied from here. It was at that point that I noticed some text saying that if you click preview, you can get a preview of what the style sheet looked like. So I clicked preview and I was presented with the normal monobook theme except that the text and some of the lines were all wrong. So, I tried removing the entire style sheet altogether and, when clicking preview, I was presented with the normal, grey monobook skin, completely working.

Phew.

So, I clicked save.

Big Mistake.

I was presented, yet again with my bright, florescent orange, never-goes-away, annoying skin. I was back where I started. What could I do? Was it a bug in Wikipedia? Had my browser stopped working? No. It was just me (yet again) forgetting to read the small print. Apparently, I had to press Ctrl + F5.

Well, I thought to myself, let's press it and see.

Now, you're all going to be wandering whether it worked or not. If it hadn't then I would have probably ended up using the classic skin forevermore. If it had worked then I would have been overjoyed; everything would have been back to normal.

The truth was that it did work.

(everyone sighs with relief) Now, you're all probably mutter to yourselves 'newbie'. Well, if you do, I'm going to leave you with one final thought - The nice, plain, grey monobook shin is far better than any other skin I've seen.

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