MediaWiki Fratman Skin

Posted byjasonpearce 55 Comments on MediaWiki Fratman Skin

MediaWiki Fratman SkinMediaWiki is a free application, registered under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is used to run Wikipedia, the World’s largest online encyclopedia, as well as many other wikis.

Fratman is a minimalist skin for MediaWiki-driven websites. Originally developed by Jason Pearce, users began making enhancements and fixing bugs. To better facilitate community-driven development of this popular skin, the project has moved to Google code. If you would like to participate, please in further developing this skin, please send me your Google username. So far, there’s nothing there, so if you want to help get things started, I’d appreciate it.

Previous posts about this skin within my website can be found here.

55 replies on “MediaWiki Fratman Skin”

  1. Jason,

    Love the skin, man. I’m using a self-modified version of 1.7 on a Wiki project now, and have noticed something – it seems like when you pick “Edit”, the “Article” link in the “Views” portlet continues to stay “selected”. Is this by design?

  2. Jason, I also love your skin and want to use it for our local village site. However I came alone a bug which I do not understand Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wfnomsg() in /www/htdocs/leermens/wiki/skins/MonoBook.php on line 130

    And it does not show me the navigationbar

    Line 130 shows

    What to do? I’m not a php-expert.

    I’m using your skin version 1.5 and use MediaWiki 1.6.7, with NL language. Version 1.7 does not work yet since my hosting provider is not using PHP5 :-(

  3. Just replace wfNoMsg() in the skin template with wfEmptyMsg() HTH

  4. Jason, Thanks that is solved. Is there also some documentation, since the sheet looks fine in Firefox, but in IE6 the sidebar moves to the top. I show some IE-patches in de monobook folder. Do I have to connects those patches in a way? regards Peter

  5. I am having the same problem and have no idea how to fix it, I need to figure it out soon though, any help would be greatly appreciated.

  6. Hi, I really like your skin, but I have a little problem. I got the following error message:

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/mw/wiki/skins/MonoBook.php on line 142

    The headline ‘Navigation’ is there, but the navigationbar items aren’t. Can U help me?

    line 142: data[‘navigation_urls’] as $navlink) { ?>

  7. Peter’s and Sean’s problem about the sidebar moving to the top, overlaying the logo, can be solved by commenting out the following code from skins/fratman/IE60Fixes.css as shown: /* column-one {

    position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
z-index: 4;

    } / (you will need to do exactly the same for the other IE fix files, IE55fixes.css and IE50fixes.css, for users with those browsers). While you are at it, you might also comment out the whole of the section in those files under the heading /the tabs*/, which just make the Views menu in the sidebar look different form the other menus in the sidebar.

    The problem seems to have arisen from copying over these fix style sheets from monobook, where they are used to fix styles that are different in fratman, and so they mess up rather than cure IE problems.

    I hope this helps!

  8. I have used Fratman in the past and it worked great. I am trying to set up a new site, on Mandriva 2006.0 with MediaWiki 1.8.2 + Fratman 1.7. It just doesn’t work and I don’t know what I am doing wrong.

    I replaced the “monobook” directory with the fratman files and copied the fratman_enhanced.php overtop of the MonoBook.php file in the parent directory. But when I go to the site, it doesn’t look at all like Fratman- wrong fonts, wrong layout, no Frat graphics. In fact, it looks identical to the “standard” skin (if you set $wgDefaultSkin = ‘standard’; in LocalSettings.php instead of “monobook”)

    Any ideas? Perhaps Fratman 1.7 is not compatible with MediaWiki 1.8.2 and I have been pounding my head on it for no reason? Thanks

  11. Hi

    I love the skin it made what I was trying to achieve look good, so thanks.

    I just need to change the footer so I can add Commons SA licence … how do I do it? Which bit to edit

    Thanks

  12. Hi,

    I am seeing an orange vertical bar on the left side of the footer for the full height of the footer on IE 6.0. I am using MedaWiki 1.9 with the 1.7 version of the skin. I am a site administrator and not very good in CSS or PHP.

    Regards, Chuck

  14. Problem was resolved. Copy part from Monobook.php ” and place to Fratman.php (or Fratmanenchaced.php).

  15. Just started using v1.7 with MediaWiki 1.8.2 in a couple of educational wikis (see https://oocpp.coderswiki.org ). It works nicely after some fixes mentioned in previous comments and some twiddling for IE browsers. I like the clean look of the FratMan skin, thanks for making it available.

  16. If anyone is having problems with IE7 with 1.7 of this skin, I found it works perficly without the IE fixes css files. The fixes break it. I don’t have IE6 installed, so I can’t say what happens for that.

  18. You need to be replaced in the header file fratman_enhanced.php

    open original fratman_enhanced.php and replace block “?>”

    from same block of MonoBook.php (Before editing, make a copy of original file)

  20. I got the toolbar to show up, but the horizontal rule/seperator (—-) doesn’t show up…

  21. Hi,

    Is there any way to make the [edit] links smaller, or aligned to the right instead of left? As it is, they are too big and ruin the section titles of each page -It’s still a great design though!

    Even better, could the [edit] links be removed altogether for users not logged in?

    I’m only an administrator, so any help would be really appreciated. Thanks,

  22. Solved. Add this to ‘fratman_enhanced.php’ before the tag and it will removed the section edit links for users that aren’t logged in.

    data[‘loggedin’]) { ?>

    [By the way, Nigel’s IE fix for the sidebar overlap problem works for me. But also, when I followed Hal’s suggestion and removed all the IE fixes .css files my pages formed perfectly. I’m using Mediawiki 1.9.2 and IE7]

  23. Oops, I meant….

    Solved. Add this to ‘fratman_enhanced.php’ before the tag and it will removed the section edit links for users that aren’t logged in.

    data['loggedin']) { ?>

    [By the way, Nigel’s IE fix for the sidebar overlap problem works for me. But also, when I followed Hal’s suggestion and removed all the IE fixes .css files my pages formed perfectly. I’m using Mediawiki 1.9.2 and IE7]

  24. Ok, last try at making the code appear properly…

    
data['loggedin']) { ?>

  25. Hi, great design !!

    “Solved. Add this to ‘fratman_enhanced.php’ before the tag and it will removed the section edit links for users that aren’t logged in.

    data[‘loggedin’]) { ?>”

    …before what tag is that ?

    Thanks !

  27. Great skin which I’ve used on several sites, most recently https://www.clevelandpools.org.uk. I have a couple of queries, though. Firstly, the search box only shows up for logged in users. The other thing is, how do I edit the sidebar that loggedin users see? I can edit the default Navigation bit in …/MediaWiki:Sidebar but not the logged-in bits under View and Personal Tools. I can go to …/MediaWiki:View and there’s a page with ‘View’ which I can edit but none of the bits underneath such as ‘>>Message’ or ‘>>Discussion’.

    Thanks,

    Roger

  29. Hi Roger, how did you hide the “change” link for not-logged-in users ?

  34. Hi there,

    I got two problems with this (fine) skin (I use version 1.9x of mediawiki):

    1 – The already mentioned problem with the WYSIWG-Toolbar. Which block do I have to replace in the enhanced_fratman.php (taken from the monobook.php) so the Edit-Toolbar shown up?

    2- Here are two screenshots of the Firefox and the IE – menu. You see the strange looking of the “Views-Menu” and the small sign in front of any Navigation-Point. What do I have to change si that it looks like the Firefox-Version?

    https://img510.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ffmenufratmanjf4.png

    https://img513.imageshack.us/my.php?image=iemenufratmanmq7.png Thanx!

  36. Re – Toolbar missing

    Other people seem to have tried to post how to fix the edit toolbar, but I guess the comment system sanitizes the php out of the message.

    You need to copy line 72 (only one line) of MonoBook.php and put it into fratman_enhanced.php BEFORE line 67.

    I am going to try to post the line here with some added spaces so hopefully it won’t get removed:

    < ?p h p print Skin::makeGlobalVariablesScript ( $this->data ); ? >

    Don’t paste that in because I added white space, but copy that line from MonoBook.php.

    To clarify – the above line needs to go into fratman_enhanced.php ABOVE the line with “wikibits.js” in it (line 67).

  37. hey Bastian, the menu view is strange in IE, i solved it:

    rename:

    IE50Fixes.css to IE50Fixescss IE55Fixes.css to IE55Fixescss IE60Fixes.css to IE60Fixescss IEMacFixes.css to IEMacFixescss broswerforms_compact.css to broswerforms_compactcss

  38. Not sure if this thread is still being monitored, but I hope someone can help me with this. I download v1.7 above and extracted just the files in it to my skins folder. I kept getting an error – dealing with the “require_once(‘anand_fratman_17/includes/SkinTemplate.php’)” command – until I copied the entire wiki/includes folder into the anand_fratman_17 folder. Then I got something, but still not the full skin.

    Should I be copying other folders into the anand folder? Is there a single compressed file that has all I need?

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  42. Hi all, I’m having tough time getting edit toolbar to work on this skin. I’ve tried copying line from monobook skin, but it still does not work. Monobook skin’s toolbar appears, but not in this one. I’ve downloaded version 1.7 of this skin, mediawiki I’m using is 1.13, i get error in my Safari console: ReferenceError: Can’t find variable: addButton Any help is appreciated! Thanks all

  43. Nevermind. I found some other code missing in fratman file. Adding these lines helped: < ? php $this->html(‘headscripts’) ?> < ? php if($this->data[‘jsvarurl’]) { ?> <script type=”text(‘jsmimetype’) ?>” src=”text(‘jsvarurl’) ?>”> < ? php } ?> < ? php if($this->data[‘pagecss’]) { ?> html(‘pagecss’) ?> < ? php }

  45. Ok, I added the following block at line 66 (surrounded by php tags, of course):

    print Skin::makeGlobalVariablesScript ( $this->data ); $this->html(’headscripts’); if($this->data[‘pagecss’]) html(’pagecss’);

  46. I also wanted to say thx for the nice skin. I just would need some help with 2 problems. While it works fine, I have 2 problems:

    1 I cannot see the edit icon bar in the edit mode.

    2 I cannot get RSS feeds to work.

    skin implemented on this page: http://www.univie.ac.at/jelinetz/

    I tried the above mentioned workarounds but they didn’t seem to have any effect.

    help would be great. cheers, gego

  48. Q: In monobookI see the editor and everything works fine, but as soon as I switch to my custom skin the edit “menu” is no longer there.

    A: Add this line to the skin template (usually located in /skins/skin_name.php where “skin_name” is the name of the skin you’re using-> fratman.php or fratman_enhanced.php) right before the tag (meaning at the end of the head section):

    < ? php $this->html(‘headscripts’) ? >

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  50. Hi all, Fratman skin is really great!

    Hi removed IE*.css in order to solve the visualization problem, but now my sidebar (from Navigation till the end) is a link to MainPage! :( Any idea? Thanx a lot,

    Jobe

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