Skin:Chameleon

Chameleon is a highly customizable MediaWiki skin that uses Twitter Bootstrap 3.

It currently provides five different layouts to chose from. The standard layout features a horizontal navigation menu with dropdowns at the top and a horizontal menu with dropups for the language links at the bottom. Each layout is defined in an XML file and as such easily adaptable to your needs.

Installation
The Chameleon skin requires Composer for installation. (But why!?) If Composer is installed globally, run
 * 1)    If necessary install Composer.
 * 2)    Go to your MediaWiki installation directory
 * 3)    If necessary (on MediaWiki up to 1.23) copy the file   to
 * 4)    If necessary (on MediaWiki up to 1.23) copy the file   to
 * 5)    With Composer installed, run
 * 1)    ✅ – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the skin is successfully installed.

Remarks

 * To actually activate Chameleon as the default skin of your wiki, include  in your
 * It is not necessary to install any dependencies anymore. Composer will take care of that.

Installation on MediaWiki 1.25 and greater
These instructions are significantly different to those above, but may work for some installations that already have composer installed.
 * 1. Use an SSH client to connect to your server. eg. FireSSH.
 * If you already have FTP access, then you may find that your existing FTP username/pw are sufficient.
 * If you are unable to connect via SSH, and you have a server control panel, it may allow you to create and configure an SSH account. Otherwise, contact your hosting provider.
 * Once you connect to your server with SSH, you will see confirmation and a command line prompt, eg:
 * 2. To discover which directory you are current in, enter the bash command:  It will list the current subdirectories.
 * You may need to change directory several times to drill down to your require directory (this will be different for you), eg:
 * (the MediaWiki script directory)
 * 3. To check whether composer is installed, at the prompt, enter:
 * If composer is not installed, you will see a message: composer: command not found, and you will have to investigate how to create composer.phar
 * If composer is installed, you will see the composer logo in ascii art, and a summary of available commands.
 * 4. At the prompt, enter:
 * If it all goes well, you will see a number of responses ending without any errors.
 * If composer is installed, you will see the composer logo in ascii art, and a summary of available commands.
 * 4. At the prompt, enter:
 * If it all goes well, you will see a number of responses ending without any errors.

Click Expand to see a typical summary of successful responses:
 * The Chameleon skin should now be installed, and available in your MediWiki preferences.
 * 5. Errors. Although you may be running MediWiki under a particular version of PHP, it is possible that when you SSH to your server, that it runs under an earlier version (eg. 5.3.3) causing composer to generate an error, and the Chameleon installation to fail. In this case, you have to (a) select a later version of PHP (b) point to your composer executable directly:
 * Instead of entering:  Enter:
 * where:
 * is the full path to PHP v7
 * is the full path to the composer.phar executable.
 * You will need to discover the paths to your PHP and composer.phar on your server.

Documentation
The documentation will be successively moved into the sourcecode repository. This allows to better keep it in sync with the development of the code. Moreover it allows to go back in time and see the documentation for a particular version of the skin.

Use the documentation index page as a starting point.

Customization
The Chameleon skin can be highly customized. The documentation on how to do this can be found at Github.

Moreover Skin:Chameleon/Cookbook contains instructions on how to achieve more complex customizations.

Live examples

 * Solutions-web.eu and its test page of bootstrap features with $wgRawHtml set to false
 * Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte (in German)
 * OGD Cockpit
 * a complete set of examples from getbootstrap.com (in wiki-markup mode and in raw html mode)
 * FabLab Toscana wiki pages
 * EcommerceWiki
 * Wiki Valley
 * Marketing United (based on Chameleon, Paper theme and a lot of CSS customizations)

For further examples see Chameleon's page on WikiApiary

Contributing to the project
see https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-chameleon/blob/master/docs/contribute.md

Bugs and feature requests should preferably be reported on the Wikimedia bug tracker.

Comments, questions and suggestions should be sent or posted to:
 * the Chameleon discussion page
 * the author

Roadmap (kind of)

 * Improve documentation
 * Add many more components and layouts (suggestions welcome)
 * Improve responsiveness
 * Improve accessibility (see )
 * Make customizable (colors, fonts, sizes) via a Special page
 * Put a selector for the layout on the user preferences page
 * Compatibility with extensions

Credits
see https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-chameleon/blob/master/docs/credits.md