Help:Administrator's Handbook/Sidebar

Working with the Navigation Side Bar
One of the more esoteric features of MediaWiki software that is under the control of an administrator is the maintenance of the navigation sidebar that appears (usually) to the left of the content on all MediaWiki pages.

Editing the Side Bar
The main sidebar is changed by editing MediaWiki:Sidebar. It is permanently protected, preventing non-admin users from editing the page.

Explaining features
There are two sorts of links that can be added through this interface:
 * Predefined project variables
 * Direct project links

Both of these have advantages and disadvantages which will be explained below.

Predefined Project Variables
The default setup of the navigation bar is only the predefined variables, so a common misconception is that this is the only sort of item that can appear on the navigation bar. Indeed prior to MediaWiki 1.5 this was the only way that you could make changes to the navigation bar, so it is common for people to still use this approach.

The values for these project variables must be changed from the list of System messages directly. For example from the default example above regarding the current events link, currentevents-url can be changed at MediaWiki:Currentevents-url and currentevents at MediaWiki:Currentevents. Note that if you want to change the page links or even the text of the navigation bar for this one item, you don't even need to edit the navigation bar itself directly but simply need to edit the variable link instead.

Advantages

 * Displays links otherwise hard or impossible to obtain normally.

Disadvantages

 * Additional step of trying to hunt down variable pages if you want to make changes
 * Often the actual content in the variable has absolutely nothing to do with the name of the variable. For example, portal-url may in fact be a link to a self-referential parody group of pages or to the main project discussion pages.
 * Adding additional variables requires developer access/root access to the computer that is hosting the content.

Direct Project Links
This is a more commonly used feature for adding in the navigation bar and is much easier to work with. Specific syntax issues will be addressed in the next major section.

Advantages

 * No need to create variables or edit outside of the main sidebar template
 * Context of the content is obvious
 * Less likely to mess up the whole project (such as might happen if MediaWiki:Monobook.js is edited with the wrong syntax)

Disadvantages

 * Not as customizable

Sidebar Syntax
It is important to note that either naming convention can be used to help rearrange the order of the links on the sidebar, and both may be used simultaneously. You are not restricted to sticking to one naming convention.

MediaWiki software uses the unordered list syntax for keeping track of items in the sidebar. Major sections are delimited by a single asterisk (*) and individual links by two asterisks (**). Additional levels may be added depending on the nature of the link, but only affect the indentation of links on the sidebar and should be used very sparingly.

Following the asterisk, the link is added by using the format of URL (or page link) followed by the public description of that link. There is no need to use the or  brackets to form these links as the MediaWiki software will do this automatically.

Here is an example of a modified sidebar from the default:


 * navigation
 * mainpage|mainpage
 * portal-url|portal
 * currentevents-url|currentevents
 * helppage|help
 * sitesupport-url|sitesupport
 * Project:Village Pump|Village Pump
 * tools
 * recentchanges-url|recentchanges
 * randompage-url|randompage

Note here that Recent Changes and the Random Page links have been moved to a completely separate section. As an example, a link to the main project discussion page has been added.

Other text or even images can be added to this sidebar, but you should be careful as it is used on every project page and has a major draw on server resources as a result. This is something that should be kept very simple and neat as a guideline.


 * Note: Keep in mind that these changes will be very visible to all participants of the project, and that experimentation with this feature is likely to confuse new users to the project. On larger projects with many users, you should try to get a general feel for what changes need to be made from the users rather than arbitrarily make changes on a whim.