Question on sidebars and login page

[j2sw]

I am wanting to do a few things.

1.Is it possible to have a plain style login page? Something with very little sidebar links.  I am aiming for a private wiki where I don't want to have links to what is going on in the login page.

2. Can you have a customized sidebar per category with a category landing page?  For example, I have a "Sites" category. I want a sidebar with links that shows up under the site categroy only.  Then if I have a "servers" category I have a customized sidebar for the servers category.  

Any pointers?

 

[HSRobinson]

Your questions are the same essentially -- you want to customize the sidebar based on the page. See

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar/Hacks

for how to "Show a different sidebar for anonymous users" and you can then extend that concept to show a unique sidebar for different category pages. You would need coding skills for this task.