The sidebar that you are seeing on the left side of this page is a part of the York Template. This document will describe how to customize the sidebar for your DokuWiki site.

The Department name displays at the top of the sidebar. This is not configurable. Click on the Department name to visit the Department web site in another tab/window.

The Wiki Name is displayed under the Department name. This is the name that you provided to tech in your request for a Wiki. If you click on the Wiki name, you will always be returned to the main page of your site. If you decide to change your Wiki name, follow these steps:

• Select the “Admin” button.
• Select “Configuration Settings”.
• Under “Basic Settings”, change “Wiki Title”.
• Click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page.

The sidebar contains links to other Wiki pages. These links can appear at the left margin (level 1), or at increased indent (level 2 through 5).

Sidebar links will only be displayed to users who have read access to those links. This means that your sidebar will change depending on who is logged in. Links to external sites will always be displayed in the sidebar.

The sidebar is contained in the sidebar Wiki page in the root namespace. To edit the sidebar, use the “Edit” button that appears below the sidebar links when you are logged in as an admin.

Sidebars are built using an XML syntax as follows:

<sidebar>
  <item [ns="name"] [level="#"] link="link">[description]</item> 
</sidebar>

The sidebar page must start and end with the <sidebar> and </sidebar> tags respectively. In between these tags, you will list sidebar entries in between <item> and </item> tags. There are several attributes that you may specify - namespace, level, link, and description.

The ns attribute allows you to specify under which namespace your sidebar entry will be displayed. If you do not add the ns attribute to your sidebar entry, this entry will be displayed when the user is in any namespace.

The level attribute allows you to specify an indent level for your sidebar entry. level can be from 1-5. If you do not add the level attribute to your sidebar entry, this entry will appear at level 1 (left margin of sidebar). As you increase the level, the indent will increase as well. You can use the level attribute along with the ns attribute to display submenus.

The link attribute allows you to specify the link for a sidebar entry. This is the only required attribute. The link can be an internal wiki link like a:b: or an external link like http://www.cse.yorku.ca.

description is the value of the item node for a sidebar entry. This is what the user sees in the sidebar. If you do not specify a description, the Wiki will use the first heading on the destination page as the description.

The attributes to the item tag can be specified in any order.

Now let's see a few examples!

Here is a simple sidebar with 2 level 1 entries - Contact, and Assignments:

<sidebar>
  <item link=":contact">Contact</item> 
  <item link=":assignments:">Assignments</item>
</sidebar>

Now, let's say that when the user clicks on “Assignments”, you wish to open up a second level in the sidebar showing “Assignment 1”, and “Assignment 2” indented underneath “Assignments”:

<sidebar>
  <item link=":contact">Contact</item>
  <item link=":assignments:">Assignments</item>
  <item ns="assignments" level="2" link=":assignments:a1:">Assignment 1</item> 
  <item ns="assignments" level="2" link=":assignments:a2:">Assignment 2</item>
</sidebar>

The search area on the sidebar allows you to search through your Wiki site. The search is local to your Wiki site only.

The York Logo is displayed at the bottom of the sidebar along with the page filename, the last modified date, and who modified the file.