MediaWiki Foreground Skin

MediaWiki skin that focuses on putting your content in the foreground. Supports responsive layouts and has classes predefined for Semantic MediaWiki. Built on the Zurb Foundation CSS framework.

Download

First, copy the Foreground source files into your MediaWiki skins directory (see skinning for general information on MediaWiki skins). You can either download the files and extract them from:

https://github.com/thingles/foreground/archive/master.zip

You should extract that into a folder named foreground in your skins directory.

Alternatively, you can use git to clone the repository, which makes it very easy to update the code, using:

git clone https://github.com/thingles/foreground.git

After that, you can issue git pull to update the code at anytime.

Setup

Once the skin is in place add the following line to your LocalSettings.php file.

require_once "$IP/skins/foreground/foreground.php";

This will activate Foreground in your installation. At this point you can select it as a user skin in your user preferences.

To activate Foreground for all users and anonymous visitors, you need to set the $wgDefaultSkin variable and set it to foreground.

$wgDefaultSkin = "foreground";

Configuration

Use following features in LocalSettings.php to change the behavior.

showActionsForAnon => true displays page actions for non-logged-in visitors.
NavWrapperType => 'divonly': only a div with id navwrapper will be created. '0' - no div will be created (old behavior), other values will be used as class.
showHelpUnderTools => true a Link to "Help" will be created under "Tools".
showRecentChangesUnderTools => true a Link to "recent changes" will be created under "Tools".
IeEdgeCode => 1 will produce a meta tag with "X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge", 2 will sent a header, 0 nothing will be done

These are the default values:

$wgForegroundFeatures = array(
  'showActionsForAnon' => true,
  'NavWrapperType' => 'divonly',
  'showHelpUnderTools' => true,
  'showRecentChangesUnderTools' => true,
  'IeEdgeCode' => 1
);

Usage of NavWrapperType

With a setting like:

'NavWrapperType' => 'divonly'

and the created div called navwrapper anonymous visitors can change the setting of navbar (fixed or sticky) by User-Script (Firefox-extensions like greasemonkey or scriptish), users can take a gadget or their JavaScript, CSS ... :

$('#navwrapper').addClass('sticky');

Or you set class in LocalSettings.php with:

'NavWrapperType' => 'contain-to-grid fixed'

and visitors will be able to remove this class by their own JavaScript or gadget ...

Notes on other skins

As you build a wiki out with Foreground you will likely use the responsive grid from Foundation. This is key to making a responsive wiki, and is one of the largest migration requirements when you want to move a wiki that ppreviously used Vector (and likely a lot of tables for layout) to Foreground. Once you do this, the ability of a user to select whatever skin will be removed. If you take full advantage of Foreground in your templates the lack of the Foundation grid will make viewing the wiki using Vector or MonoBook very difficult.

Because of this, it is suggested that you set the $wgSkipSkins variable to make sure that everyone sees the site as you intended it. This removes other skins from being user selectable options.

# Foreground is specific, so lets disable other skins
$wgSkipSkins = array( 'chick', 'cologneblue', 'modern', 'myskin', 'nostalgia', 'simple', 'standard', 'filament', 'monobook', 'vector' );

You may also want to allow users to set a User CSS if they want to tweak things inside of Foreground. This is entirely optional.

# Allow User CSS, mostly for skin testing
$wgAllowUserCss = true;

Using Foreground

There is a mailing list to discuss Foreground. Please join to connect with others and explore questions about using Foreground on your wiki. You can see a list of wikis with Foreground installed at WikiApiary.