Printer Friendly Codex
One of the most annoying issues I have with the Codex is the lack of a printer friendly link. There are plenty of times where I and many others would like to print out an article to keep handy for use later on, or to keep right in front of you as you are performing the steps to a particular set of directions. I was going to work on adding this printer friendly link to the Codex via CSS but thanks to Jeremy Clarke who appeared on episode 6 of the WordPress Weekly podcast, I now know of a way to enable this functionality.
As it turns out, you can register an account with the Codex website. For whatever reason, I’ve never noticed this until it was pointed out to me. Once I registered an account, I saw a wealth of options that I hadn’t seen before. After clicking on My Preferences to manage my account, I noticed I could change the skin that is displayed on the Codex. By default, the Codex (default) skin is chosen, but the one that closely resembles the look and feel of Wikipedia is called Monobook.
After changing the skin, you’ll notice on the left hand part of the page that there is a section called a Toolbox. Within this tool box is the coveted Printer Version link which will change the article’s page layout so that it is printer friendly. I have gone back and changed my skin back to the default codex to see if registering an account produced this toolbox.However, there simply is no printer version link within the default skin.
Personally, I enjoy browsing the Codex through the Monobook skin. Thanks to Wikipedia, many people are already used to the layout, so it shouldn’t be that hard of a switch.