MediaWiki Default Styles
A Guide to Using MediaWiki in a Hosted Environment
An instructional website by the developer of mh370wiki.net - a MediaWiki site about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
The concept of Cascading Style Sheets is that a hierarchy permits inheritance but to override the style inherited by an element requires understanding the cascade.
MediaWiki has various styles pre-defined which are loaded as default styles.
Just as the configuration settings in Localsettings.php override MediaWiki default configurations, styles (CSS) created in MediaWiki:Common.css override MediaWiki default styles.
Similarly, a customised appearance for the interface can be developed by styles (CSS) in MediaWiki:Vector.css which override the Vector skin default styles.
If Vector is not the default skin, the custom CSS will be in MediaWiki:Skin Name.css
Finding MediaWiki Default Styles
One location with many style sheets in .less format is the directory /w/resources/src/mediawiki.skinning
Some of the interesting files are:-
/w/resources/src/mediawiki.skinning
- content.body.less - defines mw-body-content
- content.tables.less - defines a usable class .wikitable
- content.elements.less - defines styles for elements including headings, links, paragraphs, lists
- i18n-all-lists-margins.less - default margins for list types ul, ol and dd
- interface-site-notice.less - position and alignment of #sitenotice
- interface-subtitle.less
- interface.category.less
/w/resources/src/mediawiki.less
- mediawiki.skin.defaults - defines a lot of default colors
/w/resources/src/mediawiki.page.gallery
- gallery.less - defines styles used for image galleries. See Help:Images
See Also: Vector Skin Styles