Is there an easy way to make a pleasing mediawiki table?

Question

I use a MediaWiki instance on a thumb drive to keep track of a ton of stuff. In the past, I've been in a hurry so I haven't had the chance to look for a nice way to make tables, so this syntax has served my purposes well:

{| border=1
...
|}

Now I want something a little nicer; I'm used to using CSS to make nicer table borders, but I'm not finding a clean way to do this syntax via MediaWiki. Basically, I want a table that looks equivalent to this HTML:

<table style="border-collapse: collapse">
    <tr>
        <td style="border: 1px solid black">one</td>
        <td style="border: 1px solid black">two</td>
    </tr>
</table>

Setting border on every cell is going to be difficult. My initial guess is I need to add a table class to a CSS file somewhere; if so, where might the appropriate file be located?

Answer 1

Do like they do in Wikipedia: create a "prettytable" template (see source; you can skip the fancy <noinclude> stuff) where you put some HTML / CSS, e.g.:

border="1" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; 
background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaa solid; border-collapse: collapse;"

Then use the template like this in your tables; it does a simple "include":

{| {{Prettytable}}
...
|}

The same technique can be used for styling cells. You should find plenty more examples of this in different Wikipedias (and other Wikimedia projects).

Answer 2

You can customise the CSS used via pages in the MediaWiki namespace, for example, MediaWiki:Common.css. There are also skin-specific CSS pages, e.g. MediaWiki:Monobook.css, for the default skin.