Mediawiki:Sidebar

[Kunda1]

Here's everything you wanted to know about the Mediawiki Sidebar
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar

Our Sidebar is at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar

I personally find the sidebar very hard to utilize.

• It's long (goes off screen) which perhaps we can collapse or modify?
• It has a lot of info on it that doesn't flow when I read it, the names of the links have extraneous words that make them take up 2 lines instead of 1
  Ex. Navigating in the 3D space, Working with workbenches etc..
• We can nest similar subjects like

  Code: Select all

  Working with:
    Workbenches
    Constrains
    Meshes
  

• My preference is to have the Recent Changes link in some portion of the first section of the sidebar, that's what I'm used to and how I check the activity of a wiki.

Couple of things: The sidebar changed when we updated to a new mediwiki version. Whatever happened to the old sidebar ?
also I recognize that translation will be affected, hence I'm willing to learn what that would be to merit 'invasive-enough' editing?

[yorik]

I'm all for simplification too. Indeed there should be only a handful of very simple items...
Translation is not such a big issue I suppose, it's not a lot of text anyway

[vocx]

I personally find the sidebar very hard to utilize.
...
We can nest similar subjects like

Code: Select all

Working with:
  Workbenches
  Constrains
  Meshes

I agree with you that the Sidebar doesn't make sense currently. This is the reason I decided to revive {{Userdocnavi}} template, which is used at the bottom of pages. It is a fast way to jump to different sections of the wiki with single words, "Workbenches", "Arch", "Draft", "Tutorials", etc.

This was already partially-discussed in a previous thread.

According to MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar

To customize the MediaWiki:Sidebar on a wiki, you need first to be logged in with a user that has the editinterface permission - for administrators this is enabled by default. (For information on assigning a permission to groups or users, see Manual:User rights.)

Then, use a link to a page on your wiki, but replace your wiki page's title (e.g. Main_Page) in the URL/Address bar with MediaWiki:Sidebar and load that page - you should now see the current content of the sidebar. (You may need to use the syntax //yourdomain/yourwiki/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&action=edit if you use long URLs.)

NormandC wrote: ↑
Wed Oct 31, 2018 3:22 am
...
@renato: so you can't edit pages under the "Mediawiki:" namespace?

I can, now I have found a way to access, but I have not yet understood well how it works. I do not want to make disasters.
As soon as I have a little time, I'll do some tests ..

As I see it, the conclusion from that is that

• Only administrators can edit the sidebar. Who exactly has administrator rights? Apparently renato has those rights and he can edit the necessary pages, but he doesn't want to because he isn't experienced enough and doesn't want to create a mess.
• The sidebar currently works by inserting templates in different languages, so it works for different interfaces. Therefore, in order to change the sidebar properly, the English text should be simplified, but also the translations.
• The documentation may eventually migrate away from the wiki, so doing a bunch of work on it (changing the sidebar) may not even be necessary. That is, why invest time to fix something that may be scrapped anyway? I personally think that the sidebar should still be changed now, even if the plan is to migrate to another system eventually.

[Kunda1]

Only administrators can edit the sidebar. Who exactly has administrator rights? Apparently renato has those rights and he can edit the necessary pages, but he doesn't want to because he isn't experienced enough and doesn't want to create a mess.

I do.

[renatorivo]

My preference is to have the Recent Changes link in some portion of the first section of the sidebar, that's what I'm used to and how I check the activity of a wiki.

In this way?

sidebar3.png (33.54 KiB) Viewed 1342 times

[Kunda1]

In this way?

Try it and see

[NormandC]

Dude, he already did.

[Kunda1]

Dude, he already did.

Duh, weird how i didn't register that when I saw the graphic. LGTM.