MediaWiki:Cheatsheet

The following text was created with the template Cheatsheet at Community Central. Instead of editing this page locally, you should edit the template at Community Central and reload its contents by deleting everything on this page and replacing it with:



This cheatsheet tells you where and how you can change your wiki's looks and functionality.

Stylesheets
The most common choice is highlighted in green:

Tip:

 There is also MediaWiki:Common.css which is automatically included by MediaWiki:Monobook.css but not by MediaWiki:Wikia.css. So if you want to use MediaWiki:Common.css to create rules for both Oasis and Monobook you have to load it into MediaWiki:Wikia.css with the @import statement:

JavaScript
The most common choices are highlighted in green:

Caching Issues
Every file you download from the internet gets cached. Normally that's great because it reduces traffic both for your own computer and for Wikia's servers, but it becomes a problem when it comes to testing design changes. It may take a several hours before your changes take effect - unless you use the following tricks:

You need to bypass your browser's cache:


 * Internet Explorer: hold down the Ctrl key and click the Refresh or Reload button, or press Ctrl+F5.
 * Firefox: hold down the Shift key while clicking Reload; alternatively press Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl-Shift-R.
 * Opera users have to clear their caches through Tools→Preferences
 * Konqueror and Safari users can just click the Reload button.
 * Chrome: press Ctrl+F5 or Shift+F5

Note: You will have to do this twice: Once for the JS/CSS page itself and once for your test page.

More often than not, that will be enough, but sometimes - especially when you test your edits with a different browser - you will need to purge Wikia's caches as well. Go to the URL bar of your browser and append  to the URL like so:

needs to be rewritten to:

Tip:

 There's a nifty script at the Developer's wiki that adds a PurgeButton to your pages. That spares you the URL hacking.

Tip:

 Firebug users can easily find out whether a script has loaded by typing one of the script's variable or function names into the Firebug console. If it says "undefined", then you're not looking at the latest version of the page yet.

If nothing else seems to help, it might help to have a little patience. After a few hours each and every cache between you and Wikia will have updated.