How to change the skin of a mediawiki based site?

Unlike wordpress users who are spoilt for choices, there aren’t really many good skin options for mediawiki users.

There are not many sites that distribute mediawiki skins.

Wikimedia has a few skins and Mediawiki2u.com has another few. If you google hard enough, you can find a few more sites out there.

1. Lets us say we want to install a theme whose name is bluetheme.
2. Down load your mediawiki skin. It is usually a zip/rar/tgz archive. bluetheme.zip/bluetheme.rar/bluetheme.tgz
3. Unzip the archive to a local folder and examine it.
4. Usually, the .php files for the theme are in provided along with the theme.
5. In this case you should have two files called bluetheme.php and bluetheme.deps.php and all other files should be in a subfolder bluetheme.
6. Upload bluetheme.php, bluetheme.deps.php and the blue themes subfolder to the /skins folder your mediawiki directory.
7. To activate the theme that was just uploaded you will need to modify your LocalSettings.php file in the / folder of your mediawiki installation.
8. Open LocalSetting.php in a text editor. Locate the text “$wgDefaultSkin = ‘monobook’;” and replace it with “$wgDefaultSkin = ‘bluetheme’;”
9. Clear your browser cache and refresh the site to see the new theme.

In case bluetheme.php is not a part of the theme you downloaded, you can manually create it by editing the existing files. For more detailed instructions, read this.

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