WebLeftBar Cookbook

Instructions and tips how to use WebLeftBarPersonalTemplate.

WebLeftBarPersonalTemplate is a topic template to create a personal left bar block for each user. The personal topic, <user>LeftBar is included in WebLeftBar, the left menu used in PatternSkin. It is only visible to you. You can put links to frequently visited topics there, or a dynamically (although there is a LittleBugOnWebLeftBar with dynamic content in Cairo, fixed in Dakar) generated list of topics.

Each link is an item in a bullet list. So it can look like this:

• My links
  • WebHome
  • WebIndex
  • WebChanges

(but with your personal topics).

The list is formatted with CSS, and the bullets themselves are not displayed, and also indents are flattened. To get an idea of the actual look, see the list above formatted as in the left bar (you need to have PatternSkin set to on):

By default the <user>LeftBar topic has an edit link. In case you lose the edit link line of text, here's a copy:

<div class="twikiSmall"><a href="%SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%WEB%/%TOPIC%?t=%GMTIME{"$year$mo$day$hours$minutes$seconds"}%">edit</a></div>

-- TWiki:Main.ArthurClemens - 15 Aug 2004

Docs Comments

See also RestructuringWebLeftBarProposal

-- MartinCleaver - 13 Jul 2005

According to this page, "You can put ... a dynamically generated list of topics" in the sidebar. I have searched (a lot) but I can't find where this is documented. How is it done?

-- KeithEdmunds - 26 Jul 2005

See TWikiSearch and FormattedSearch.

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Jul 2005

This is broken in Cairo, and will hang the server (see also LittleBugOnWebLeftBar). Fixed in Dakar.

-- ArthurClemens - 26 Jul 2005

Thanks for the pointer in response to my earlier question. What I really want to do is have all topics below a certain parent listed in the sidebar, but I cannot see how to do that. TREEVIEW, in fact, does exactly what I want, except that the sidebar requires a bulleted list, so what works with TREEVIEW in a normal page fails in the sidebar (despite the fact that it can generate an UL list, presumably because TREEVIEW is generating true HTML rather than TWiki markup). The generating dynamically of a list of all topics below a given parent in the sidebar is tantalising close - but just out of reach. What have I missed?

-- KeithEdmunds - 15 Aug 2005

I was trying to use METASEARCH to get dynamic menu (all subtopics for a given topic) as follows:

%METASEARCH{type="parent" topic="%TOPIC%"}%

However the

%TOPIC%

-- AndyAndrews - 31 Dec 2007

Try %BASETOPIC%.

But also have a look at HierarchicalNavigation - that does what you are looking for.

-- ArthurClemens - 31 Dec 2007

Thank you Arthur, the HierarchicalNavigation is exactly what I was looking for.

-- AndyAndrews - 31 Dec 2007

Can we save the wanted pages in the WebLeftBar??

-- SashankhDonkena - 03 Oct 2008