From charlesreid1

General Information

The basic idea behind skinning MediaWiki is to create PHP/HTML code that will serve as a header and footer for your wiki. You can imagine the page being split into several pieces:

Page Head and Title This is defined by MediaWiki
<html>
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
Page Body: Body Header This is defined by your skin

<div id="banner">A Fancy Banner</div>

<div id="navigation">Navigation menu</div>

<div id="mediawiki">MediaWiki links/navigation/buttons</div>

[etc...]

Page Body: Wiki Page Content This is defined by MediaWiki (and inserted/abstracted by your skin)

<!-- begin mediawiki content -->
<?php $this->html('bodytext') ?>
<!-- end mediawiki content -->

Page Body: Body Footer This is defined by your skin
Page End This is defined by MediaWiki
</body>
</html>