Help:Sidebar

Wikia's Monaco skin has a robust navigation sidebar that can be fully customized. The navigation is broken into two sections: the Main Navigation, which is multi-level, and the two-column Link Toolbox.


 * For admins - you can set the default navigation seen by everyone by editing a few MediaWiki namespace articles.
 * For users - you can set a custom navigation for yourself only, by editing a few User sub-pages.

See Help:Sidebar (Monobook) for information on the side in the Monobook skin.

Main Navigation

 * Admins - To customize the main navigation menu just below the search box, edit the MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar page. Until you fill in your own values for the Monaco-sidebar article on your own wiki, we will use default values from this page on Messaging: http://messaging.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar (this default page can only be changed by Wikia staff).
 * Users - To customize the main navigation menu just below the search box, edit the User:/Monaco-sidebar page (you can reach it through this shortcut: Special:Mypage/Monaco-sidebar).


 * Each asterisk represents a level in the menu hierarchy. In this example, the three top-level items displayed in the sidebar are "Superheroes Wiki", "Characters" and "Comics".


 * Hovering over the "Characters" item will bring up the second tier of the menu, "Heroes" and "Villains". The articles about Superman, Batman and Spider-Man are nested inside the "Heroes" submenu.


 * The menu items automatically link to their respective articles. You can use external links here - the software will recognize them and link to them properly. If you'd like to specify different text for the menu item, first use the article name followed by a pipe character (|), followed by the display text. This is also true for external links; unlike the usual space, you will need a pipe instead.

* mainpage | Superheroes Wiki * #popular# | Editor's pick   (see "magic word" section below) * Category:Characters | Characters ** Category:Heroes | Heroes *** Superman *** Batman *** Spider-Man ** Category:Villains | Villains *** Lex Luthor *** Penguin *** Green Goblin * Category:Comics | Comics ** DC Comics ** Marvel Comics * #category-minorcharacters#  (see "magic words" section below)


 * Main Navigation - Magic Words
 * In addition, we've added a few "magic words" that you can use in the Main Navigation. The new magic words are as follows:


 * #category1# = Creates a multi-level menu item that displays the name of the category with the most articles, shows the top 7 pages in that category, and has a "see more..." link to the category page.
 * #category2# = Same as above but for the category with the 2nd most number of articles.
 * #category- # = you can specify a particular category name ( #category-superheroes#, for instance).
 * #popular# = This is meant to be an "editor's choice" list that the admin of each wiki can populate. You can add articles to the top of this list here: MediaWiki:Most popular articles. If there are no entries on that page (or fewer than 7 entries), the rest of the list will automatically be populated with the articles with the highest traffic on that wiki.
 * #visited# = a list of the articles with the most traffic on that wiki.
 * #voted# = a list of the highest ranked articles by vote.
 * #newlychanged# = articles that have most recently been changed.
 * #topusers# = a list of featured users.


 * Note: For the #category1# and #category2# magic words, categories with certain keywords will be excluded from the #category1# and #category2# lists. Here are a list of the keywords that we'll exclude: Image/images, Stub/stubs, Screenshot/screenshots, Screencap/screencaps, Article/articles, Copy edit, Fair use, File/files, Panel/panels, Redirect/redirects, Template/templates, Delete/deletion, TagSynced. We will do our best to filter these words in other languages as well so that this method of automatically choosing relevant categories works as well as possible. If you specifically want a category with one of those keywords on the main nav, then use #category- # and replace the " " with the category name you want.


 * If you wish to include a category with a space in the name, e.g. "Wikia Widgets", replace the space with an underscore, e.g. #category-Wikia_Widgets#.

Link Toolbox

 * Admins - To customize the link toolbox, which appears underneath the main navigation, edit the MediaWiki:Monaco-toolbox page on your own wiki.
 * Users - To customize the link toolbox, which appears underneath the main navigation, edit the User:/Monaco-toolbox page (Special:Mypage/Monaco-toolbox).

Until you fill in your own values for the Monaco-toolbox article on your own wiki, we will use default values from this page on Messaging: http://messaging.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Monaco-toolbox (this default page can only be changed by Wikia staff).

Default list:
 * upload-url|Upload image
 * specialpages-url|specialpages
 * helppage|help
 * recentchanges-url|recentchanges
 * randompage-url|randompage
 * whatlinkshere|whatlinkshere

The default list uses special URL strings (upload-url, etc) instead of referring directly to the page name or external links desired, which is designed to make translation and localization easier, but can make editing the toolbox menu a little harder.

If you wish to edit the URL strings, the actual links are stored in separate MediaWiki messages such as MediaWiki:Upload-url. Note these special URL strings don't work if you add white space before the pipe. The special string "whatlinkshere" is unique because it is parsed to incorporate the name of the current page. If you wish to add additional links, you do not need to create new URL strings -- you can simply add them in the same format as for the Main Navigation.

The list of links is automatically separated into two columns. The first half of the list being in the left-hand column and the second half in the right-hand column. The link formatting is the same as the multi-level menu: internal wiki link or external URL to the left of the pipe and label to the right of the pipe. You cannot use comments in this list.

Example list:
 * Forum:Index                |Forum
 * Help:Contents              |Help
 * m:Help                     |Meta help
 * http://irc.wikia.com       |Live help
 * w:Wikia:Statistics         |Statistics
 * Special:WidgetDashboard    |Dashboard
 * Special:Preferences        |Preferences
 * Special:Specialpages       |Specialpages
 * whatlinkshere              |whatlinkshere
 * Special:Recentchanges      |Recent changes
 * Special:MultipleUpload     |Multiple uploads
 * Special:Search             |Advanced search

You can avoid having a label wrap and consume two lines in this link toolbox if you either:
 * choose short labels or
 * organize all shorter labels in the first half of the list and all longer labels in the second half
 * This second point benefits admins more than regular readers/contributors because of the 3 user-related links mentioned below. The two longer labels get added to the right-hand column while the shorter label gets added to the left-hand column.

We automatically add 3 special links to this list for user pages, user talk pages, and user profile pages (this last for wikis that have the social tools added). Those link toolbox labels are:
 * User contributions
 * E-mail this user
 * Block user
 * Block user will only show up for admins.

Community box
The community box shows the number of articles on the wiki, provides quick links to your user pages, and displays the most recent edits on the wiki. It cannot be customized.

Internationalisation
Changing the navigation and toolbox in this way will only change the view for logged out users, and users with the same language set as that of the wiki. Logged-in users who have chosen a different language in their preferences will see the default menu for their language (as stored on the Messaging wiki) unless you have also created a translation on your wiki by editing MediaWiki:Monaco-toolbox/xx (where xx is the language code).

So on an Italian wiki, only users who are viewing in Italian will see your menu customizations. A user who has chosen German in their preferences will not see them.