User talk:Yourbuddybill

Configuring and Using MediaWiki
I've installed mediawiki in two places (well plus on my usb flash drive) and help edit in another. Much of it is easy to do, but the things I'm having the most challenges with, are the following:
 * Image Thumbnail - Something I am doing is wrong, probably the paths but I am not sure.
 * Skins - I really do not know PHP, and I am comfortable with my own CSS, but without knowing where the classes and IDs get used, its hard to figure out the effects. I've tried a few from the user skin gallery, but many of those come out broken.  In the end I want something based off monobook, but allows me to have 2 or 3 columns in the main body (maybe only on certain index/landing pages) and move subsections around, or pull excerpts from other articles, like I can with Joomla.
 * Special Pages - every now and then instructions or extensions refer to special pages which do NOT appear in the special list of special pages section. How can I find them, or build an index?
 * Categories - Special:Categories is single column alphabetical and blah to use. I've installed an extension CategoryTree, which atleast allows multi-column display with +/- expanding to see Category hierrachies, but I still want more and I cant really define it, maybe information about the Categories (# articles tagged, definition or home article page?)
 * Templates - At first this was cool ... find a neat template from another wiki, check their license, and if ok copy the wikimarkup. Then you see it includes another template, rinse, repeat.  And then it uses a variable I do not have defined.  Somehow, getting a Template package with all dependencies would be nice.  Then again, I've sen places where they have templates used only on a single page, and huge numbers of single purpose pages have their own template.
 * Edit Bar - where do the extra buttons come from? I've seen ones for tables and font selection but could not figure out what extension they might be using. Oh, and on this site down below now are those special character quick add thingies, for brackets, category, image, etc. where did that come from, I want that! AH ...Extension:CharInsert is the answer.
 * Spam - besides captchas, I thought setting up accounts to only have post/edit privileges after being emailconfirmed would help, but nope they can still anonymously or with a brand new login post their misspelled drug ads or jibberish.