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 the 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 the your sidebar will adapt 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. When you wish to edit the sidebar, you can 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="#NAMESPACE"] [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 a namespace (ns). This namespace indicates where your sidebar will be displayed. If you do not specify an ns, your sidebar entry will be displayed in all namespaces. ns can be used along with the link level to allow you to create sidebar entries that only display when you are in a certain namespace.

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.

Warning: If you use an & in your sidebar, you MUST use the valid XML syntax of <code>&amp;</code> otherwise your entire sidebar will not display.

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 second level in the sidebar showing “Assignment 1”, and “Assignment 2”. Note how the sidebar will display the level 2 entries when in the “assignment” namespace:

<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>

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.