Manual talk:Interface/Sidebar/Archived discussion from meta

This page holds archived discussion from the equivalent page on meta.

Navigation sidebar in 1.6.2 not showing up
I just upgraded our wiki from 1.5.8 to 1.6.2 In version 1.5.8 the navigation sidebar had been modified and was working fine. Since the upgrade it does not appear. When I go to MediaWiki:Sidebar the modified Navigation menu shows the modified information but it does not show up on the site. Any assitance or advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

--Sean 19:06, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I have the same problem - pretty sure it's to do with how the navigation array is handled (or even named). hopefully someone can help?

Missing MediaWiki:Sidebar
Q: I have just installed WikiMedia on a test platform. Everything is working great. However when I search for 'MediaWiki:Sidebar' I get back 0 results. I am logged in as a sysop and have verified my permissions by looking at the SQL tables. If I just goto the page by typing the below link into my browser I get a blank editable page.

http://localhost/mediawiki/index.php/MediaWiki:Sidebar

Following the documentation to setup the page everything looks right but the actual navigation bar never changes.

A: the link to type into your browser should be:

http://{your wiki's URL}/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar

When you edit this page (you need to be a sysop), the changes should show up immediately upon clicking "Save page".

Alternatively, you can create a link by adding MediaWiki:Sidebar to any page; show preview, click on the new link; edit the MediaWiki:Sidebar page, and save it.

Sidebar Doesn't Update on Main Page
Q: I'm a SysOp on my wiki and I edited the MediaWiki:Sidebar page, but my sidebar did not change. Any suggestions?

A: The changes needed time to propagate.

Follow Up Q: I edited the MediaWiki:Sidebar page, and the changes are visible when I am on an Edit page (for any page in the wiki) but are not reflected when I am on the main page or on any article page. Is this also a case of waiting for changes to propagate? Michael Dorosh 06:27, 11 January 2006 (UTC) EDIT - for anyone else dying to know, the answer is, of course, yes...patience is a virtue! :) Michael Dorosh 06:32, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Follow Up Q2: What determines the time needed to propagate? I changed the Sidebar, but it didn't update for 4 days on my main page(maybe the server rebooted). This is true for all pages seen in AllMessages. How can I make it update immediately (I have local db access)? I can't wait weeks for it to update. (this is on Sourceforge)
 * This is something that I'm also very interested in, I've yet to discover how to force stuff like this to refresh. I've cleared local cache, added the purge option to the URL but have had no luck.
 * I am playing with a Wiki installation on Windows. I have the same problem as above. The sidebar does not refresh on the home page even if I run iisreset. However, on the edit page, the changes show up imediately. --Adrian Hamza 20:44, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Follow Up Q3: Y'all have probably tried this but... I recently upgraded to 1.6.3 and my sidebar was fixed at the default rather than showing the customization that I had created in MediaWiki:Sidebar. As with previous updates, I simply waited for the changes to propagate. But since it was taking to long I decided to go to MediaWiki:Sidebar and just "save" the page. The changes showed up immediately. Hope this works for you all. 206.229.31.42 10:57, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Horizontal line in Sidebar

 * Is there any way to add a horizontal line in between two items on the Sidebar?

You may need to do this in CSS using the skin/stylesheet. Have a look at the monobook skin to work out how this is done.--150.203.95.122 02:14, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Edit Sidebar

 * If I got to MediaWiki:Sidebar, I cannot edit it. It says the page has been locked.  Do I need to make myself the Sysop?  Please answer this (here). (unsigned comment by User:NickD)
 * I'm pretty sure you need to be a sysop, yes. Maybe it says in the docs someplace. Ryan Norton T 22:05, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * And how do I make myself the sysop? I found this page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sysop but I think it is only talking about how to become a sysop (via a democratic process) in one of the Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, WikiCties, Wiktionary, WikiSource, etc). What about my own install of MediaWiki? Oct 29, 05 User:NickD
 * Just found this http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Administration Oct 29, 05 User:NickD
 * I've got media wiki installed on my development computer at home (http://localhost/myWiki/), and my wiki is called 'CSD_wiki'. Where on my wiki is the page that analogous to the above mentioned MediaWiki:Sidebar page? I'm trying to add a link on the left navigation menu titled 'Table of Contents'.  I'm using v1.4.8.  Thanks, Bryce
 * On my personal wiki (version 1.5.3) it's at "index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar". You can edit it like a normal page, but it appears as the sidebar.  I have no idea where it's physically stored.

This is a hack, but it's all I could come up with.
 * I wanted to remove some links on the sidebar in 1.5, but as NickD found out, the page is locked, and like him I have no idea how to edit it. Even being the sysop didn't help. Since all I wanted to do was remove a few links (specifically, the Support, Current Events, and Community Portal links), I edited the CSS file to hide the links. I changed /path/to/wiki/skins/monobook/main.css by adding the following line (adjust for the links you want to hide, of course):
 * 1) n-sitesupport, #n-currentevents, #n-portal { display: none; visibility: hidden; }

How can I reach the Site to modify the Navigation-Menu?
I think, I want an entry below "Restricted special pages" pointing to MediaWiki:Sidebar. --Maletin 16:35, 17 November 2005 (UTC)


 * type MediaWiki:Sidebar in the search box.
 * Then simply edit page.
 * I think people have trouble finding the page because its not directly accesible for admin and :sysops. you need to search for it. LOL DBZVelena 12:09, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find MediaWiki:Sidebar anywhere so I created a page of this name. This worked fine.  joe
 * However, when modifying the MediaWiki:Sidebar on a www.free.fr site, it does not work. Navigation menu is unchanged. What can I do? 31 May 2006.

Open in new window
Hello! I placed an external link in my wiki-nav-bar. can i advice the mediawiki to open the link in a new window/tab? thanks, --Nyks 20:30, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

There might be a method with using ' target="_new" '. I saw it mentioned in some previous documentation on customizing the navigation bar area... Skins_Hacks for older versions of MW. Good luck. When you find the answer, update this page too. :)

--IainDavidson 23:52, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Nav Bar vs. Toolbox area.
OK, I found the 1.5.x instructions on how to customize the 'MediaWiki:Sidebar' for the navigation.

How about customization of the 'toolbox' area ? I can't seem to find it mentioned on this page.

Let me know, thanks

--IainDavidson 23:50, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
 * 1.5: I have the same question, I can edit MediaWiki:Sidebar and create a toolbox on top of the search bar, But I cannot change the toolbox under the search bar. Any help ? Thanks. For example - Is it possible to make "User contributions" only visible to admins ?
 * Alas the toolbox format is wired in. There is a discussion of this at the bottom of the main article. &mdash; NickP
 * The "Toolbox" is indeed "wired in" (hard coded) into each skin. In MonoBook, it's in skins/MonoBook.php. It starts around line 182. The variable "nav_urls" appears to be defined in includes/SkinTemplate.php, but the skin only uses certain elements of that array. (sorry, if this isn't the right place for this, I cannot find another viable page containing "toolbox")

Adjusting the tool tips in the navigation bar
My question is how do you adjust the tool tips for the Navigation Bar entries. There is an array defined in MediaWiki:Monobook.js, but I am not quite sure how to adjust it. &mdash; NickP 12:33, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Problems with Internal Links/Wiki Page Names
For whatever reason, I have been unable to get internal links (to local wiki page names) to work when editing the navitation bar. I have also been unable to find good examples of what these should look like, since the syntax appears to be different for the Navigation bar than it is for other pages. (So, for example, I can use " This is an example page " within a normal wiki page and it works fine but when I use, for example "Examplepage|This is an example page" within the MediaWiki:Sidebar page it doesn't work. Moreover, the way it doesn't work is rather frustrating.  If I view the MediaWiki:Sidebar page itself, the link works from there.  However, it doesn't work in the navigation bar and instead says

--error: link target missing--

The simple workaround that does work fine, though, is to use the external link format to link to an internal page. (For example, go to the page in question and copy the URL of it into the target side of the Navigation bar, as in "http://examplewiki.com.invald/Examplepage |This is an example page" or some such.)

--Hougen 20:18, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

A: I think I figured it out. It's kind of complicated. Both parts, before the pipe and after the pipe refer to page names in the mediawiki namespace but they should not be inclosed in []. The part before the pipe refers to the name of the page that contains the name of the page where the link points. The part after the pipe, refers to the name of the page that contains the link text/label. For instance, I included ** AmericaLink|AmericaDisplay in the sidebar page. Then I created two pages, a page named MediaWiki:AmericaLink, and a page named MediaWiki:AmericaDisplay. You cannot click on the sidebar to create these pages, type in the browser the URL of the page!! In the page MediaWiki:AmericaDisplay I included the text that I want to see on the sidebar, so I included America. In the page MediaWiki:AmericaLink I need to define the name of the page that is rendered when the link is selected, let's say USA. So there are 3 pages that are used, MediaWiki:AmericaLink, MediaWiki:AmericaDisplay and USA in the default namespace. --Adrian Hamza 21:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

A2: Actually all I did is removing the [] before the pipes and everything worked like a charm. For example: Art links | Art produces a "Art" link on the sidebar that points to the Art links internal link. If that page doesn't exist, you can click on it (on the sidebar itself!) to create one.

Moving the SideBar from the left to the right side
Question: Can it be done and if so, how? --Ikester 09:55, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Answer: I started experimenting with it. Got the navigational sidebar to the right, but not the logo! See here: Moving the MediaWiki SideBar from the left to the right side

Too complicated, can you format it?
The sidebar page mechanism is too complicated, see my description above. Can you control the formatting? For instance I tried to have a sidebar that looks like this: but no matter how many * I include, the end result is --Adrian Hamza 21:42, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
 * America
 * New York
 * Seattle
 * Chicago
 * America
 * New York
 * Seattle
 * Chicago

Mixed case in section heading?
I followed the instructions for 1.5 and created a new section below the "navigation" section. This results in an additional box below the "navigation" box--just what I wanted. However, though I typed: * MyCompany ** internal link 1 I see "mycompany" (all lower case) as the heading above the new box. I created a page "MediaWiki:MyCompany". Its contents are used but are also converted to lowercase.

I'd like to see the company name there in the same way we usually write it (which is mixed case). How can I achieve this? Thanks for your help, [mailto:Hans-Albert.Schneider@gmx.de Hans-Albert Schneider].

''I think the problem is that MediaWiki parses your text and uses two slightly different parsers for the links than for the navigation header. This is to prevent people from slipping links into the menu titles. My suspicion is that you would have to examine the code itself to see what is happening. However if you examine monobook.php carefully there is a section where these headers are put in and you might be able to modify this. This should only be done if you are talented with php scripts.''

I figured out why the navigation is taking so long to change
For those of you who are waiting for your sidebar to change, simple edit the main page and it will fix, you have to cause the file to requery the db. It might be long and tedious if you have alot of articles but it's better than waiting forever, btw I found this out by accident when I canged my front page and saw the sidebar change. . . .lol. . .24.3.123.174 06:57, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

A:Thx a lot, this was very usefull :D -Tabu

Austin- For some reason, it still didnt work for me. Do you mean, edit it using wiki, or using an FTP program and actually editing index.php?

Link not correct
I created a wiki subdmain after i installed the wiki. I modded LocalSettings to have the wgScriptPath = "" (basicly root dir for the subdmain). Everything works fine, except the side bar. It still points to the /wiki dir without chaning the domain (i.e.: was dom.com/wiki is wiki.dom.com, links to wiki.dom.com/wiki <= which doens't exist). I would appricate any help. Thank you

Add a new navigation bar?
How can you add extra navigation bars on MediaWiki? I know how to add links to the navigation bar but I would like to create my own navigation bar like they have on the MediaWiki website here--Alexander 21:11, 19 May 2006 (UTC)


 * ANS: You can do this in the MediaWiki:Sidebar by setting a new first level item (just like "navigation" ) --Jfjago 16:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC) - See their navigation layout here - Source

is the navigation sidebar customize in 1.6.3 working?
somebody got an "how to do idea"? thank --Vev 17:59, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Links with external images?
Is there a trick to put external images in the sidebar, that then link to external pages? e.g. small banners - of course there is always the way of editing the skin-template, but it would be nice to be able to change it just in the sidebar-article. --Porter 06:58, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Hiding the Toolbox from a class of users
Hey folks,

I'm planning on creating a website for the teachers in our school to create lesson plans, quizzes, etc...and for students to then look through the website and take the lesson plans. I want to hide the toolbox from the students somehow. I've tried creating a custom namespace and moving the toolbox (by editting MediaWiki:Toolbox to CustomNamespace:Toolbox) but this didn't achieve what I wanted.

I'd also like to customize the navigation menu for different users, so that different users see different things. I'm going to give this a shot myself because I just had a brainstorm, but if I get stuck I'll be back. ''Well I got stuck. Any suggestions?''

I know how to hide the toolbox (and have done so) for users that are not logged in. Any suggestions?