Help:Sidebar (Monobook)

Each wiki has a sidebar on the left of the page. Above the "search" box, administrators on each Wikia can customise the sidebar by adding, reordering or editing lines in MediaWiki:Sidebar. The "search", "toolbox", and "wikia" sections cannot be changed this way.

See MediaWiki:Sidebar (here on Central Wikia) and Commons:MediaWiki:Sidebar for examples of a modified sidebar.

A default sidebar
* navigation ** mainpage|mainpage ** portal-url|portal ** currentevents-url|currentevents ** recentchanges-url|recentchanges ** randompage-url|randompage ** helppage|help

In the default sidebar, there is one section called "navigation". The second link points to the place set in MediaWiki:Portal-url; it reads as set in MediaWiki:Portal.

How to quickly add a link
This is the easy way, and it is good enough for most Wikia.

You can make a link like Forum  rather easily by adding a line to MediaWiki:Sidebar, for example like this:

* navigation ** mainpage|mainpage ** portal-url|portal ** forum:index|Forum ** currentevents-url|currentevents ** recentchanges-url|recentchanges ** randompage-url|randompage ** helppage|help

Advanced procedure: If you want, you could instead create MediaWiki:forum-url and MediaWiki:forum, then add the line. You could then create localised MediaWiki:forum/de, MediaWiki:forum/es, and so on for users who set the wiki language in their preferences. (You could also create MediaWiki:forum-url/de if you expect speakers of that language to use a separate forum.) The six default links already do it this way, so you can readily create MediaWiki:mainpage/de for example if you have a main page in another language.

Example configuration
w:c:dni:MediaWiki:Sidebar contains:
 * navigation
 * mainpage|mainpage
 * recentchanges-url|recentchanges
 * randompage-url|randompage
 * helppage|help


 * community
 * portal-url|portal
 * helppage|help


 * language
 * alphabet-url|alphabet
 * grammar-url|grammar
 * dictionary-url|dictionary

To make these links function, there are new pages like MediaWiki:alphabet-url and MediaWiki:alphabet.

If you look at any page in the D'ni wiki, you see three sections: navigation, community, and language (unless they change their sidebar again).

Lines
Lines that do not begin with * or ** are discarded. Lines that do begin with ** and do not contain | are presently also discarded, but this might change in newer releases of MediaWiki (to which Wikia might upgrade).

A line that begins with * indicates a section header. Each Wikia starts with a "navigation" section, but it is possible to change that section's name and to add more sections.

A line that begins with ** and contains a | represents a link in the sidebar menu.

Do not localise MediaWiki:Sidebar itself
In order maintain consistency for users who have set another language in their preferences, MediaWiki:Sidebar should only be edited in the default language of the wiki. This means, you should not edit "MediaWiki:Sidebar/de" unless you explicity want German speaking users to see a different sidebar to everyone else.

Do not repeat list values
Do not repeat list values in MediaWiki:Sidebar; they will cause duplicate XHTML ids which are illegal in XHTML.

You also should not name any section "search", "toolbox", or "wikia" because that duplicates the existing sections and also causes CSS problems.

Miscellaneous
The Wikia navigation box is not editable in this way since it uses shared messages.

More help can be found at mediawiki.org.

From Wikia, a Wikia wiki.