Contents 1 Welcome 2 Sidebar? 3 Changing the background image 4 Changing link color

WelcomeEdit

Hi, welcome to the BioShock Wiki! Thanks for your edit to the Talk:Fort Frolic page.

Need some help finding your way around? Here are some good places to look:

New to editing?

• Check the Community Portal for a list of ways you could start helping out around the wiki.
• The BioShock Wiki:Manual of Style is also good reading for any new editor.
• The help pages can teach you about how to edit and how use the wiki tools.

Questions?

Feel free to ask an administrator or a featured user, or leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! -- Gardimuer (Talk) 15:44, 2010 December 10

I hate automatic messages. --Rigas • Talk • Deeds • 15:48, December 10, 2010 (UTC)

Baw, don't hate on the Welcome Bot. ;) It tries hard. ~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 20:20, December 15, 2010 (UTC)

Sidebar?Edit

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by "sidebar." Are you using the Wikia skin or the Monobook skin?

In the new Wikia skin there is a side "rail" to the right on all pages. It contains advertisements and various other things such as "Recent Wiki activity" and a "Create a page" button. There is also a navigation bar at the top which contains links to pages, and there is a bottom floating bar with a "My Tools" section. You can choose to add a link to Special:RecentChanges in the My Tools section- it's something I use all the time. Recent Changes can also be reached by clicking "See all activity" at the top of Special:WikiActivity (which most people will find by clicking the "Wiki Activity" button at the top right of all pages.)

On the other hand, you could be using Monobook, in which case there is a sidebar on the left, and a link to "Recent Changes" is in the "community" section.

So... could you clarify your question? I'm not sure what you are asking for. ~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 20:20, December 15, 2010 (UTC)

Alright. I think you are correct, so I will move the link soon. ~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 20:29, December 15, 2010 (UTC)

No problem. :) ~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 18:17, December 27, 2010 (UTC)

Changing the background image Edit

There is more than one way to change the background.

You can use the theme designer to give your wiki a simple background image for the Wikia skin. The image would have to be less than 100kb, and you wouldn't be able to adjust much about the way the image displays. You could choose for the image to be tiled or not, but those are your only choices with that method. To use the theme designer on Chicken Invaders Wiki, go to w:c:chickeninvaders:Special:Themedesigner. Choose "Customize" from the bar at the top of the screen then click on the box under "graphic" and choose to upload your own image.

The second method is more flexible, and it involves editing your wiki's MediaWiki:Wikia.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.css. On Chicken Invaders Wiki these pages would be at w:c:chickeninvaders:MediaWiki:Wikia.css and w:c:chickeninvaders:MediaWiki:Monobook.css. To change the background image you would add the following lines to those pages:

Example (this is what we have in the BioShock Wiki's Wikia.css):

You can learn more about options for the CSS background property here: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_background.asp

My advice is that you check out the design pages of other wikis and compare them to see what different background properties can do. For example:

• http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css
• http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Wikia.css

~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 00:36, January 16, 2011 (UTC)

You can change the background color or background image of the sidebar in Monobook by adding the following to w:c:chickeninvaders:MediaWiki:Monobook.css:

For a background image:

For a background color:

Example:

~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 04:49, January 18, 2011 (UTC)

Changing link colorEdit

Usually people have the color of all links on a wiki be the same. For example, this is what we have for link color in Monobook on this wiki:

If you want to change just the link color in the sidebar, use this code:

If you plan to do a lot of layout adjustments like this, you should get some tools that will make it easier. Firefox has an addon called Firebug that lets you examine the CSS code for any website. You could use it to figure out and test these changes you want to make. ~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 17:43, January 21, 2011 (UTC)

Glad to help. :) I learned these things from experience, observation, and trial and error. Half a year ago I had no idea how any of this worked, but looking at the MediaWiki pages of other sites and asking for help on the Community Central Forums let me figure out how CSS worked. Firebug was also a big help. ~Gardimuer  ^{ ʈalk } 17:01, January 23, 2011 (UTC)