The sidebar that you are seeing on the 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.

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 decide to change this 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.

You can always return to the home page for the Wiki by clicking on the Wiki Title.

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

Each wiki namespace can have its own sidebar. When you visit a wiki namespace, the sidebar that you will see is the combination of all the sidebars from the root namespace up to the visited namespace. For example, if you are in the a:b namespace, the sidebar that you view will consist of details from the root namespace sidebar, the a namespace sidebar, and b namespace sidebar. All sidebars are optional.

Finally, sidebar links will only be displayed to users who have read access to those links. This means the your sidebar will adapt depending on who is logged in.

Sidebar files can exist in each namespace and have the name “sidebar”. When you wish to edit these pages, you will use the sidebar edit buttons. The edit buttons appear below the sidebar when you are logged in as an admin. One edit button will appear for each level of the namespace that you are in.

For example, if you are in namespace a:b, you will get an edit button for:

• :sidebar - the sidebar for the root namespace
• a:sidebar - the sidebar for the a namespace
• a:b:sidebar - the sidebar for the a:b namespace

Sidebars are built using an XML syntax as follows:

<sidebar>
  <item [id="#ID"] [level="#"] link="LINK">[description]</item> 
</sidebar>

Your sidebar file must start and end with the <sidebar> and </sidebar> tags respectively.

Next, you may optionally specify an ID. The ID is used to link sidebars together from various sidebar files. If you only have one level of links, you do not need to specify an ID at all.

Next, you have the link level. If this will be a level 1 link (appearing at the left margin), use level=“1”. For a level 2 link, use level=“2”.

Next, specify the link name. For a simple sidebar, this is the only required field. The link can be an internal link like a:b: or an external link like http://www.cse.yorku.ca.

Next, you can specify an optional description. By default, if you are linking to an internal DokuWiki page, the Wiki will use the first heading tag on the page of the document as the description.

Now let's see a few examples!

A simple :sidebar with 2 level 1 entries:

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

Now, let's say that when the user clicks on “Assignments”, you wish to open up a level 2 in the sidebar showing “Assignments 1”, “Assignments 2”, and “Assignments 3”. First, we attach an ID to assignments in :sidebar:

<sidebar>
  <item link=":contact"></item> 
  <item id="assign" link=":assignments:"></item>
</sidebar>

Now, we create the level 2 sidebar in :assignments:sidebar as follows:

<sidebar>
  <item id="assign" level="2" link=":assignments:a1:"></item> 
  <item id="assign" level="2" link=":assignments:a2:"></item>
</sidebar>

Finally, have a look at the main sidebar on this wiki.

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.

special XDokuWiki document. It exists in the DokuWiki namespace, yet the

<sidebar>
  <item link=":whats_new">What's New</item>
</sidebar>

You can add:

• level=X
• id=X