[[!summary chatGPT: The author discusses their experience with using the 'clean' skin in Mediawiki, their issues with it on a new server, their modifications to fix the issues, and the new home for the clean skin.]]
[[!meta date="2011-06-02 09:47"]]
[[!tag usability]]
# motivation
mediawiki has various built in skins but i usually prefered the 'clean' skin from Kevin Hughes (shown in the screenshot).
lately i had massive problems as i was moving from a **gentoo server** to a **nix os server** probably caused by different php versions but i'm not absolutely sure. anyway as the clean skin [1] was broken with the more recent php version.
[[!img media/mediawiki-skin-clean.png caption="mediawiki clean skin"]]
## wasn't it the fault of different mediawiki versions?
i did copy my old mediawiki (and the clean skin) on a 1:1 basis to my nix os based server resulting in the same layout problems compared to using the most recent mediawiki from scratch.
therefore i conclude that issues i fixed are not caused by mediawiki.
## the fix
finally i decided to hack the skin to make it work again and i came up with 3 small modifications to the code and the skin was working again! after contacting **Kevin Hughes **about my changes** he decided to release the next version of his skin cc-by-sa/3.0** which is great!
but he also said that he is not hosting the skin anymore, that means: **the clean skin has a new home [2]** (namely my repository). of course, as it is open source now you can also host it on any other page. but i would welcome other modifications to be done collaboratively.
**dear kevin hughes - thank you so much for that great skin!**
# links
* [1]
* [2]