WoltLab
Consider the removal of the left sidebar
The left sidebar is very rarely used and it cannot be combined with the right sidebar as there is not enough space for it.
There is currently no solution that ticks all boxes without breaking something else, most notably introducing incompatibilities with CSS selectors.
The most promising solution is to move all boxes of the imaginary type “navigation” into a separate container adjacent to the .boxContainer containing all other boxes:
- The CSS selectors remain mostly unchanged.
- Plugins targeting the list of sidebar boxes using
.querySelector()for the.boxContainerwill break.- We can mitigate that problems to some extent by placing the “navigation” boxes below the original container and inverting the order with CSS using
order. However, that can introduce some rendering issues if the sidebar contains a lot of content in combination with the annoying early paint of Chrome and others. - Incompatibility: There is no gap between these containers and any style that changes the gap between boxes needs to be adjusted to keep the visual gap the same. Without this added gap the last navigation box and the top-most regular box would headbutt each other.
- We can mitigate that problems to some extent by placing the “navigation” boxes below the original container and inverting the order with CSS using
- The only viable display option is some sort of full page overlay (similar to how the menu works) because this allows us to render the boxes in a different location without moving them in the DOM (which breaks verbose selectors).
- Requires a novel way of marking boxes as “navigation” to properly place them in the special group.
- Some kind of toggle button needs to be added in the header area to toggle the navigation.
I imagine that removing the left sidebar would eliminate the possibility of creating page menus on the left side.
Here I should point out a possible case of use (which I have used in the past) for this type of menu: the creation of a user manual or wiki. In these cases the page menu and the ads should be on the left side, omitting the right sidebar.
I think that WoltLab Suite Core, being a CMS with pages, menus, boxes... should give freedom to the user to use it as he/she wants, making the most of its possibilities.
