Welcome to the transition guide. This page is a work in progress, and will include details on best practices for updating your wiki to the new Wikia. This page will include technical facts as well as advice on how to work with your community to create an awesome new theme.

Transition map

1. Wiki Navigation: The wiki sidebar navigation has now been moved the top of each page, for quick access to the most important links on your wiki.
2. Discussion Page or Comments: Click on the talk bubble now to visit the talk page or comment section.
3. Notifications: Instead of a bar across the top of your wiki, you will now see a dismissible notification bubble when you have new messages or there is a change to the community corner.
4. Wiki Activity: This shows you information about the latest edits made on your wiki. This is the new version of MyHome (and contains a link to Recent Changes).
5. Last Edited By: This dropdown menu is an updated version of history, and shows the most recent edits to the page.
6. Move/ Protect/ Delete: Many of the admin links formerly located at the top of the page have now moved into the Edit this page dropdown. To find move, protect and delete - click on the blue “Edit” or “Leave a message” dropdown menus. If you’re not an admin you’ll only see move.
7. Section Edit: Instead of a text link, you’ll now find section edit is available by clicking on the blue pencil icon to the right of each section title.
8. Create a Page: Create a page button allows you to create a new page in one click.
9. Add a Photo: You can find Add a Photo links in the “Photos on this wiki” module on the right hand side of the page or in the rich text editor on the edit page.
10. My Tools: My Tools is a new feature on Wikia that can be found on the floating toolbar and will follow you wherever you are on Wikia. History and what links here will appear by default, but you can easily add your favorite pages and tools to the menu by simply clicking “Edit My Tools”

Where to get started

The new look is a great opportunity to collaborate with your community about how you want your wiki to look going forward. We suggest starting a community discussion to chat about the theme, content area, templates and much more.

Content area

The new look has a fixed width, with article page content area of 660 pixels, and main page content area of 980 pixels.

One thing to consider as you move to the new look is how your content will look in this space. Do you have extra large tables? Or very large images? If so, they may need to be adjusted to fit the new content area.

Another thing to think about is very long pages. Shorter lines give better readability, but also mean the overall page can look very long. Consider whether long articles are better split in to multiple pages.

Categories

The two most linked categories for each page are shown at the top of each article. This helps people find and understand the category system, and quickly see what the most important categories are. One thing to be careful of is that maintenance categories are sometimes highly used, but not very useful to readers. Consider what might be best for your visitors to see, and make sure that is what makes it to the top.

Navigation

The top navigation is controlled via Mediawiki:wiki-navigation. This area has space for 4 main headings, and 7 dropdown links.

The navigation has been automatically copied over from the old style, but if you had larger navigational menus you may want to adjust which ones show for the new look. "Random Page" and "New Pictures" now have their own buttons elsewhere on the skin, so it's a good idea to remove these if they are on your navigation.

One way to make sure that your navigation always shows the most popular content, you can add categories surrounded by # symbols. So one of your top level items might be #category-food#. This will mean that the menus are automatically filled with the most popular articles in the category "food".

You may want to use one of your headings for community links like forums, blogs, or other areas for discussions. It's always important that the top headings give links to the things that your visitors are most likely to be looking for. This is your chance to capture their attention and get them reading your content!

Theme Designer (available soon)

The theme designer is found at Special:ThemeDesigner. As well as giving you some default themes to choose from, this can be used to give a custom design for your wiki.

If you want to keep your current color scheme, then click "Customize". This allows you to upload a background, which can be a single color or an image. You can also choose three main colors from your current theme for a quick transfer of your old look to your new. These can be entered as hex codes directly in to the theme designer, or you can choose colors from the color picker.

You can also edit the wikia.css page directly to tweak colors more directly. But the designer has been created to give you a full and attractive theme without needing to know CSS.

Common.css

Common.css isn't used for the new look, all the css is now in wikia.css or in the main site stylesheets.

The most commonly used CSS has already been transferred to ensure it continues to work on all wikis. See here for a list of CSS that is now included in the core CSS pages (draft page). If you have custom code for styling tables, infoboxes or other general elements, you should transfer this from common.css to wikia.css