Last edited one day ago
by Redaktion

2 Customizing the main navigation

Introduction

The menu editor is used in various menus of the wiki ― for example in the main navigation ― to set up navigation links. An edit link appears at the end of each menu when you focus on the menu.

menu items and activated edit link of the main navigation
"Edit"-link of the menu editor

Editing the main navigation

View the general introduction to the main navigation.

If you have set the navigation type to MediaWiki Sidebar or Extended MediaWiki Sidebar, the navigation links are created using the menu editor.


To open the menu editor:

  1. Click Edit sidebar at the end of the navigation links. This link will become visible when you hover over existing links. If the page doesn't yet exist, a corresponding note will appear and you can create the page.
Note for the initial creation of the sidebar page
Seite MediaWiki:Sidebar anlegen.

Editing the default links

A new wiki already has some links created by default. These are displayed as system messages and reference pages with the same name in the MediaWiki namespace (to support the user languages). The entire menu or individual menu links can be deleted.

View of the standard links system messages in edit mode
The default links in the "Getting started" menu

MediaWiki sidebar

This is the standard view of the sidebar. It displays custom menu items with no hierarchical structure. 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.

  • 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.

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.
      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.
Screenshot of the edit window for a subpage tree item.
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.

Show for groups

In addition, the visibility of a menu item can be limited to certain wiki groups. Enter a comma-separated list of existing wiki groups in the "Show for groups" field.

Css classes

You can also apply css classes to any item for custom styling options. The styles need to be defined on the page MediaWiki:Common.css.



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