The reason I am keen to do this is that we have a wiki which works great, but I would like to store help pages for an internal application in the wiki and link to those pages direct from the app. Although we wouldn't have concerns with people seeing the non-article stuff (i.e. the help pages) when viewing the pages from the rest of the wiki, for it to be streamlined when viewed from the application I thought it would be ideal if I gave it a simplified skin which I would design.
I have already found out that URLs can have the useskin= added (e.g. as is done in the Preview Skin page within the User Preferences pages), but following the links will revert you to your normal chosen skin.
Is there perhaps some way to adjust the skin, so that all the links contain useskin=? (I think this might have issues, since you appear to need the full pagename for useskin to work (e.g. ..../w/index.php?title=blah....&useskin=cologneblue as opposed to the short URLs).
If this isn't a smart way to go, I could consider different approaches (I run the box the wiki is on and could create a distinct wiki perhaps, although there might be disadvantages to this, such as needing to combine the user tables and maybe this would still pick up the user's preferred skin unless I re-coded things).
Any sensible suggestions gratefully received! Let me know if there's any more info you might need or if I need to clarify any points about my objective.
[I did submit this on the Mediawiki Support Desk page, but it got no response... I hope my question isn't that bad!!]