Possibly move logo display out of about.html, which is not always displayed by default

[butla]

I'm creating a minimalistic blog with Ablog. I wanted to remove the About page and just have a link to my Github (added through "extra_nav_links" with navigation.html enabled).

When I remove about.html from "html_sidebars" the logo isn't displayed and the sidebar starts with Navigation. So right now I've removed about.rst, links to it, but I still have about.html in "html_sidebars". Logo and "logo_name" display properly but seems like a strange behavior.

Also, there's a separator line above the Github link. And it's the only link in Navigation.

[bitprophet]

Thanks for the report! Probably a use case we haven't encountered before. I've no time to dig right now but if there's a way to clean things up in a backwards compatible fashion I'd accept a PR. Otherwise, probably something we can fix with an opt-in option somehow.

[bitprophet]

#97 confirms that people run into this when manipulating their html_sidebars and removing (or never adding?) about.html.

Contrary to my earlier comment here, it seems like this is technically "working as intended" - our install page even specifically says the theme is designed assuming you’ll always have about.html activated: http://alabaster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#sidebars

That said, clearly it'd be nice to make this less of a foot-gun for people. I'm open to suggestions - @butla, @chriscz, @tgoodlet, what would have made this more obvious to you? Are you seeing any actual changes Alabaster could make in its code so it's harder to make this mistake?

[chriscz]

I guess I did not read the installation docs because alabaster was installed with Sphinx. What wasn't immediately obvious was why the title in the sidebar did not appear when enabling logo_name. I now realise that the logo_name actually has nothing to do with its display in sidebar, and that setting it does not mean it will appear (which is what I originally thought).

So that's my confusion. I think that by default the sidebar should display logo or the project name when those settings are set, without having to include about.html in html_sidebars. Or alternatively, just add a note on sidebar configuration to http://alabaster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/customization.html for the logo_* parameters, because that is the first place where a new sphinx user goes to configure the theme.

[butla]

@bitprophet I don't have much time to look into it right now (and probably the comming weeks), but I guess that @chriscz gave a good suggestion.