Manual:Extension/BlueSpiceDiscovery/Main navigation

Overview

The main navigation is the main (left) sidebar in the desktop view of the wiki. The contents of this navigation bar apply to the entire wiki and cannot be created for specific namespaces.

Links can be added to this navigation using the menu editor. To keep the main navigation from becoming too extensive, it's a good idea to add links to the most important topics and to related portal pages.

​By default, some links are provided as entry points to the wiki. Wiki administrators can deactivate these links in the configuration manager if needed. In addition, you can also add new links below the entrypoints (admin permissions required). Please note that no hierarchical links can be created. Therefore, it makes sense to mainly set up links to the most important topics and to portal pages that contain additional links or page lists.

Main navigation and link to sidebar edit

​Deactivating entrypoint links

In a new wiki, some standard links are displayed under the heading "Entrypoints." These may vary depending on the BlueSpice version and can be enabled or disabled via the configuration manager menu item Skinning.

Choosing a menu type for the main navigation

In the configuration manager, you can choose between four menu settings:

MediaWiki sidebar

A simple list of links to wiki pages (often to portal pages) and is the standard view of the sidebar.

A hierarchical navigation structure is not supported.

If you need a more flexible menu, switch to the Enhanced MediaWiki sidebar.

Namespace main page list

• This view automatically displays the Main Page of each content namespace in the wiki. So every page using the syntax namespace prefix:mainpage (e.g., QM:mainpage)is displayed.
• No combination with other menu elements is possible.

Subpage tree (context-sensitive)

• This view automatically shows the subpages of a page if that page has subpages. Multi-level subpages are supported.
• No combination with other menu elements is possible.
• Useful in a wiki that primarily structures pages using subpages.

Enhanced MediaWiki sidebar

This view shows a fully customizable multi-hierarchical menu.

Here, you edit the page MediaWiki:Sidebar.json. It has the basic functionality of the standard MediaWiki sidebar. In addition, it distinguishes between the following sub elements (=node types):

• Internal Link
  • Simply provide a link to a wiki page with an additional link label. Both the page name and/or label can be created by using a parser function.

    

    Internal link with a variable.

• External Link
  • Same as internal link, but you need to provide a full url to an external website.
• Subpage tree
  • You can provide the name of a page that has one or more levels of subpages. You can set the depth 6 levels deep. This means, that if you want to show the first level of subpages, you would select a depth of 1.

Creating a subpage tree with the Enhanced MenuEditor.

You cannot use the same link label twice for different subpage trees, because the expand/collapse functionality will break.

It is not possible to change the node type (=item type) after creating it. Instead, create a new item as needed and delete the unwanted item.

Editing the main navigation

If you have set your navigation type to MediaWiki Sidebar or Extended MediaWiki Sidebar, your custom navigation links are created using the menu editor. A new wiki installation may already have some links created. You can delete these using the menu editor.

Standard custom links in the main navigation

​View instructions on the menu editor help page.

Related info

• Menu Editor
• Layout
• Alignment for navigation with long link labels
• Display icons with navigation links
• Multi-language navigation

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