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 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 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 data from the root namespace sidebar, the a namespace sidebar, and the b namespace sidebar. All sidebars at all levels 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 links 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 along with the link level to ensure that all sidebar entries for each particular ID and level will all appear together. If you are only using one level of links, you need not specify an ID.

Next, you can optionally specify a link level. If this will be a level 1 link (appearing at the left margin), then you need not specify a level at all. If this will be 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 wiki 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.

Note that the arguments to the item tag can be specified in any order.

Now let's see a few examples!

A simple :sidebar with 2 level 1 entries:

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

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

<sidebar>
  <item id="assign" level="2" link=":assignments:a1:">Assignment 1</item> 
  <item id="assign" level="2" link=":assignments:a2:">Assignment 2</item>
</sidebar>

Please note that if you view a sidebar file through the wiki engine, it will display the entire file on one line because this is how the Wiki “renders” the sidebar. The sidebar will display correctly at the side of the screen or through the edit interface.

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.