User:Samwilson/Blog/MediaWiki skins

I was attempting to create a new skin for MediaWiki 1.19.1 and found the official documentation a bit lacking for the new ways of working, especially with regard to the ResourceLoader. These are some notes I made while figuring it out (which I did, in the end).

Reading list

 * [Manual] Manual:Skinning, marked as 'historical' on 6 September 2011. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning
 * [Dantman] Tutorial: Creating a custom skin for MediaWiki 1.18+ by Daniel Friesen, 8 February 2012 http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/ webcite
 * [Freek] Creating a MediaWiki Skin by Freek Dijkstra, 1 February 2012. http://www.macfreek.nl/memory/Creating_a_MediaWiki_Skin webcite
 * [VectorTalk] Manual talk:Skinning/Vector discussion of how to clone and modify the Vector skin, last active 14 June 2012. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Skinning/Vector

Conclusion
So, in the end, a skeleton skin contains the following. Obviously, the placeholder skin name is 'skinname' and 'SkinName'. The two files 'style.css' and 'scripts.js' have been omitted.

/LocalSettings.php
Other parts omitted.