On Wikis an their looks.

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As Wikis become more popular, they deserve to look better.

A stylesheet ist a technical part of most websites that defines which fonts and colors are used, and how the site is overall designed. The good thing about a stylesheet is, that you can change the "look and feel" of a website, without having to fiddle around all the individual pages of your website: You just change the CSS-file (as it's called) and everything looks different.

In MediaWiki, the system behind Wikipedia and  JBpedia, changing the stylesheet is referred to as changing the "skin". A number of skins are provided, once you have it installed on your server, but most people keep the classic "Wikipedia" style.

Wikis are becoming more and more common to organize work among CISV working groups: Wikis are great to aggregate ideas, links and organize work. They're easy to use, accessible and can be password protected. Setting one up takes less than 15 minutes for somebody with a bit of tech experience. So in Germany now, the national board has one, the AIM planning group has one and we recently started a fundraising wiki - all using the Mediawiki software.

Unfortunately they all still look like Wikipedia. Check out, how Facebook adapted their developers wiki to their own look and feel.
Now, isn't there a smart CISVer out there who would like to create a CISV-Skin for us? To make JBPedia and all the existing and future Wikis look a little bit more like CISV?


 
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That's a good idea, not even too expensive...

The JB seems to have some designers; the graphics on this page at least hints towards it: http://www.ijb.cisv.org/mwiki/index.php/International_Junior_Branch

I think we really need to find these people. A slicker wiki is one thing but there is more that just this as far as CISV website needs go. There are dozens of folks out there who are extremely handy with photoshop and illustrator but I fear that nuts and bolts coed-savvy designers are few and far between within the organization. How do we seek out the coding whiz kids and harness their talents?

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This page contains a single entry by Nick published on May 10, 2010 2:41 PM.

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