Manual:Navigation bar

The navigation bar or side bar or sidebar is shown at the left hand side of each MediaWiki page by default. In versions 1.5 and newer, it can be modified using the MediaWiki:Sidebar page. Use the search box to find this page or follow the Special pages link, to click on System messages (which takes you to Special:Allmessages under a default setup), then look for the sidebar entry in the table.

Format of the sidebar page

The sidebar page is laid out similar to the following in MediaWiki:Sidebar :

 * navigation
 ** mainpage|mainpage
 ** mypage-url|My Page

 * tools
 ** Special:Allpages|All Pages

Headings

The items on the first level

* nav
* development
* resources
* réseau
* test

are the headings used on the sidebar and are used to break the sidebar into the various boxes seen to the left. The last box created appears above the search box.

Items

The second level items

** mainpage|mainpage
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** sourceforge project-url|sourceforge project
** extensions-url|extensions
** skins-url|skins
** CSD-Actuate | CSD-Actuate

and

** Help:Configuration settings|Configuration settings

are the actual links that appear in the sidebar; see below for instructions on setting these up.

Specifying items on the sidebar

All items on the sidebar take a format which is split by a pipe (|) character.

Link target

The left-hand portion of the pipe corresponds to the target of the link, and refers to:

1. a MediaWiki: namespace page as listed in Special:Allmessages (implicitly, i.e. without the namespace prefix) or
2. a common wiki page link
3. an external URL

MediaWiki namespace page

If a MediaWiki namespace page of the same name exists, then the contents of that page are used to determine where the link points. For example, take the Recent changes line. It is

** recentchanges-url|recentchanges

The result is the equivalent of

{{MediaWiki:recentchanges-url}}|{{MediaWiki:recentchanges}}

which results in Recent changes

Common wiki page link

This is as above, but a bit simpler, though for some reasons it may be less desirable in some cases.

External URL

To link to an external URL, simply create the MediaWiki namespace page containing the target URL:

the contents of MediaWiki:Mypage-url (from the example above) can be either

'http://www.domain.com or as complex as

"mailto:name@domain.com?cc=name2@domain2.com&bcc=a@b.com&Subject=Mail%20from%20Navigation%20bar&body=Dear%20friends,%0A%0Athis%20and%20that".

• Since MediaWiki version 1.5, you can alternatively link to an external URL by just inserting the target URL before the vertical bar, as in this example:

http://www.domain.com |Link to Domain

Note the space after the URL.

Display text

The right-hand portion of the pipe determines what is displayed for the link, and is either:

1. a MediaWiki namespace page name or
2. plain text

If a MediaWiki namespace page of the same name exists, then the contents of that page are used to determine the text displayed for the link. For instance, if the right-hand portion of the pipe contains "Mainpage", and the contents of MediaWiki:Mainpage are Main Page, then "Main Page" is displayed for the link.

You can also place plain text to be displayed here without using a namespace page; so if the right-hand portion of the pipe contains "My_Page", and MediaWiki:My_Page doesn't exist, then the text My Page would be displayed.

Browser caching problem when customising the navigation sidebar

While modifying your sidebar, you may experience browser caching problems when working in FireFox. A fix for this is to re-upload the LocalSettings.php file with a slight change - e.g. an extra space in the comments. The caching problem will cease after you hit refresh in the browser and it sees the 'new' LocalSettings.php file. In most Unix type environments, you can just 'touch' the LocalSettings.php file.