mediawiki-skins-Citizen
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StarCitizenTools
feature-request: sidebar-options
The Problem
it would be great to have a (second) sidebar that is always visible on the side instead of the current overly-menu.
Solution
have one of those options or even both:
- have a sidebar on the left and the toc on the right.
- or allow to have a sidebar on the left side and a switch-button at the top that switches between sidebar-menu and toc. this would also replace the current menu which spans as a overly over the hole page.
I think a sidebar that is always visible on the side makes for some wikis more sense that the overly-menu, because its alway in the eye of the viewer and therefore helps navigating the wiki faster. If there is for example a navigation-tree with pages and sub-pages it would be sense to be always visible instead of always having to open it via the menu-button. What do you think?
Not having sidebar always visible was both a design and a technical choice.
Design-wise, Citizen was made to cut clutter while preserving functionality on both mobile and desktop. Most of the average anon readers (which is the biggest user group on most wiki) don't interact with the sidebar on skins such as Vector and Monobook. To navigate to content related to the current page, wikilinks, templates, the Preview and Related Articles extension are more intuitive. To navigate to content that is not related, search and overlay menu serve the purpose.
Technical-wise, it is made to make use of the sidebar in MediaWiki:Sidebar, to ensure the compatibility and simplicity of the skin. Since it does not support tree menu, a custom solution is needed with a fallback to the sidebar. Some skins like Nimbus, Fandom skins (Oasis/Onyx/Cosmos/Mirage), and Bootstrap skins (Tweeki/Foundation/Chameleon) have custom tree menus, but sadly those are beyond my capabilities as I am not really a developer. Though if someone wanted to chime in to help, feel free to submit a patch.
@berot3 This is very much a "hack", as having the sidebar always visible is important to me I have added some CSS to do that: https://coasterpedia.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Citizen.css It still needs some refining.
