Open Source Activism

How do I change the navigation bar is a common question. In a Mediawiki wiki it is a simple task if you know where to go. To edit the navigation bar or sidebar, as it is actually named, go to Mediawiki:Sidebar and edit this page.

Here is what you see when you first edit this page:

* navigation
** mainpage|mainpage
** portal-url|portal
** currentevents-url|currentevents
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|help
** sitesupport-url|sitesupport

Notice the format. The first row (navigation) has 1 asterik at the beginning of the line. This is the header for the box. The subsequent lines are the links themselves. Each line starts with 2 asteriks. This syntax puts the item symbol beside the line in the sidebar. The text is then in 2 parts separated with a | (pipe). The first section is the page name or link and the second is the text to be displayed. If you are going to use an external link you must still use the | as a separator.

Lets change the sidebar to include an FAQ link and remove the donations link.

* navigation
** mainpage|mainpage
** portal-url|portal
** currentevents-url|currentevents
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|help
** FAQ|FAQ

There are more options as well beside just adding links. What if you want to add a new navigation box. In this example I will add 2 wikis managed by the Sam Adams Alliance. They are Ballotpedia.org and Judgepedia.com.

* navigation
** mainpage|mainpage
** portal-url|portal
** currentevents-url|currentevents
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|help
** FAQ|FAQ
* links
** http://ballotpedia.org|Ballotpedia.org
** http://Judgepedia.com|Judgepedia.com

Again, if you leave out the |, the links will not display. As you can see, editing the sidebar is rather simple once you know where to go.

If you want to do something even more fancy and are comfortable with modifying CSS files, you can place an image under the text, change padding or text style. For Mediawiki 1.11 find the following segment of code in the skins/monobook/main.css file:

/*
** the navigation portlet
*/

#p-navigation {
position: relative;
z-index: 3;
}
#p-navigation a {
display: block;
}
#p-navigation li.active a, #p-navigation li.active a:hover {
display: inline;
}

#p-navigation .pBody {
padding-right: 0;
}

#p-navigation li.active a, #p-navigation li.active a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
}