HowTo:Reskin Uncyclopedia

There are 365 days in a year, 366 in leap year, and most of them are crap and should be put on QVFD. However, some of these days are absolutely golden, especially for piss taking. However, not only admins can make these front page mods, you can too with the super good magical powers of Uncyclopedia!

HowTo This article is part of Uncyclopedia's HowTo series. See more HowTos

Step One

First, you need to decide on a theme. Every reskin has a theme, so you need to decide on one. Do you see how that works? Enough sarcasm, and on with the reskin! Wheeeeeeeee! Anyhoo, decide on a theme, right. Not all reskins need to be on a specific date, they can be saved for a rainy day when things are going particularly slow, like this ROT13.

Step Two

Anyway, I don't want all of these sections to be too short, so I'll just remind you of stuff. Remember to choose your theme well. Uncyclopedia being a satire site, try to make it as satirical as possible. On this step, you should think of an article title. These don't work in the format of "Subject X", put them in the Babel namespace, so you get Babel:XX, like Babel:Aa for AAAAAAAAAAAAA day.

Step Three

Tip

For more in-depth reskins, copy and paste the templates used on the Main Page and edit as appropriate.

Now, you need to start making the page yourself. You don't have to make it from scratch, unless you want to make something truly unique, but you need small knowledge of HTML for that. The generally accepted format for reskins is the same as the Main Page, so what would be best would be to skip over to the Main Page and Copy & Paste the source into a new article.

Step Four

There's not much left to do now, just edit away! Remember to not only theme it, but make it satirical. You can't get away with an unfunny Uncyclopedia article. Before you can actually put it on the front page, you have to ask an admin because they are the only ones who can edit the source of the front page. Unfunny articles will NOT get away.

How it All Works

NOTE: The next section of this HowTo is for advanced users. If you didn't understand the instructions above, then don't bother reading this bit.

On AAAAAAAA day, Uncyclopedia saw its first ever CSS reskin. You probably didn't notice much of a change, but there was one. Splarka used a little JavaScript hack to change the logo to this for the day by using this handy bit of JavaScript:

if((document.title.indexOf("AAAAAAAAA!") == 0)||(document.title.indexOf("Babel:Aa - ") == 0)) {
    document.write('<style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/ @import "/index.php?title=User:Splaka/aaaa.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css"; /*]]>*/</style>');
}

and this:

( function() { var xPathResult = document.evaluate ( './/text()[normalize-space(.) != ""]', document.body, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null ); var textNode; for (var i = 0, l = xPathResult.snapshotLength; i < l; i++) { textNode = xPathResult.snapshotItem(i); textNode.data = textNode.data.replace(/[a-zA-Z0-9]/g, 'A'); } } )()

When {{Aa:}} was put on the main page (when admins reskin the main page, they don't use the source code of the reskin, they use it like a template), the Main Page started using aaaa.css (now a redlink) in addition to Monobook.css (Uncyclopedia.css since the MediaWiki 1.5 upgrade).

Other good examples of reskins for anniversaries are Memory Alpha's Birthday, Plain Text Day and Nintendorulez's unbanning.

Now, the system has changed. Now the skin's CSS is (generally) kept at MediaWiki:Skin/Name_Space:Page_Name.css, so for the Wookieepedia reskinning, the bit in the Javascript looked like this (obviously, since then more have been added):

/* New reskin parser Instructions: 
1) Add the page title and namespace exactly ("Name space:Page name") as new skin, use 
spaces *NOT* underscores: ("Main Page": "", should be first line). The next parameter 
is optionally an existing "MediaWiki:Skin/"-prefixed file (in which case you can skip 
step 2).
2) Create MediaWiki:Skin/Name_Space:Page_Name.css and place reskin CSS content there.
*/

skin = {
    "Main Page": "",
    "Babel:Gbs": ""
}

var re = RegExp("(.*) - Uncyclopedia");
var matches = re.exec(document.title);
var skinName;

if (matches) {
    if (skin[matches[1]] != undefined) {
        skinName = (skin[matches[1]].length > 0) ? skin[matches[1]] : matches[1] + '.css';
        document.write('<style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/ @import "/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Skin/' + skinName + '&action=raw&ctype=text/css"; /*]]>*/</style>');
    }
}

So the CSS for the page would be at MediaWiki:Skin/Babel:Gbs.css.

This makes all site-wide css files editable only to to Administrators. However, a regular user can use the above code to build a .css for a reskin in their userspace. For example:

if(document.title.indexOf("User:You/Blah") == 0) {
    document.write('<style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/ @import "/index.php?title=User:You/blah.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css"; /*]]>*/</style>');
}

Then you simply need to create User:You/Blah and User:You/blah.css with the appropriate code. Once complete you can ask an administrator to apply it (by copying it to MediaWiki:Skin/pagename.css) to all users for that one page.

Links

• Uncyclopedia:Reskin Archive