Help:Main page

From Wikia Help

The Main Page on any wiki is the page that can be accessed by clicking the wiki's logo. Depending on the default language of the wiki, this will be at various titles. For example, it will be titled "Accueil" on French wikis or "Hauptseite" on German ones.

I don't know what to put on my main page!

You can create an instant main page by copying the starter kit main page to your wiki's home page. This will give you a basic page that you can then customize and style as you choose (note you will need to copy some templates as well).

First impressions count. This is the page almost everyone will see when they first arrive at your wiki, and is therefore extremely important. If you have nothing on the main page, people will think you have no articles and won't go looking. Some tips:

Give it a clean design - it doesn't need to be fancy. Make sure the code is correct!
Link to all the important sections (especially on a smaller wiki) - check out the WoWWiki main page for an example of this.
Write a short intro paragraph - telling people what the wiki is about (and what it is for) will help.

Can I call my main page something else?

Yes, you can - in fact, we recommend it! The page title is your choice, but your site will rank much higher in search engines if you move it a name such as "Keyword Wiki", where Keyword is the most likely search term for your wiki's topic.

You can change the title by moving the page.
In order for your navigation (including the site logo, the sidebar, the top bar, and the breadcrumbs in various skins) to continue working properly, you also need to place the new pagename in MediaWiki:Mainpage.
If you have modified the menus (MediaWiki:Sidebar for Monobook and MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar for Monaco), and are not using the mainpage variable, you will need to adjust any "Home" or "Main Page" links.

What if I don't want visitors to edit my main page?

In Wikia's experience, protection of the main page is generally considered harmful.

The main page should generally remain editable. If you suffer large scale vandalism on your wiki, you might want to consider watching that page more often, or making use of templates to make it harder, though not impossible, to edit. In very rare cases, the main page can be protected - there are two levels of protection available, and, if you must protect, try the lower (autoconfirmed) level first. This will prevent IP and new user edits.

For example, if your wiki is in the top 10 websites in the world and receives millions of hits a day like Wikipedia, you might have a good reason to lock pages. If you're not quite at that stage, protection will probably do your wiki more harm than good. The main page will often be the first page a new user sees, and having it uneditable is discouraging, since it implies some sort of hierarchy among editors. New users may not even realize the site is editable if they only see a locked page, and leave without contributing. Being the main page is not, in itself, a reason for protection, so try not to make the common mistake of locking this page unnecessarily.

If you must protect the main page due to vandalism, please do so only for short durations, and always with a expiration date so it is not uneditable forever in the event of your absence from the wiki.

What if I don't want the title on the main page?

You can hide the pagename on the main page of the wiki with CSS.

When viewing the mainpage of a wiki, the html <body> tag gets a special CSS class called "mainpage". This can be used to style things only on the mainpage, such as hiding the pagename. The system will apply this to what ever pagename is in MediaWiki:Mainpage, so if you rename your mainpage to something else, make sure to update that.

To actually hide the pagename header, just add this to your MediaWiki:Common.css

body.mainpage .firstHeading { display:none; }

If your wiki is displaying the Tagline, you will need this too.

body.mainpage #siteSub { display: none; }

Note: This needs to go in MediaWiki:Common.css, NOT Monaco.css.