MediaWiki talk:Sidebar/gen

I'm working on the bot. It uses MediaWiki:Sidebar/gen to create the sidebar. Here's a explanation of the current syntax: A single * at the start of a line starts a section, just like in the normal MediaWiki:Sidebar, and two ** adds an item to that section just like normal. So: Will add a new links section to the sidebar with those items.
 * links
 * link1-url|link1
 * link2

Now starting to get into the intermediate things:
 * If your section has the same name as another section, instead of creating a new one (Using the same name isn't legal in XHTML anyways and you shouldn't ever do that; so don't worry about not being able to reuse a name) you will set that section to current, and the items you add after it will be appended to that section. So:

Will add the browse and policy links to the end of the sitename section of the Sidebar (This is similar to your Navigation section)
 * sitename
 * browse-url|browse
 * policypage|policy

You can also alter links by using the same name as another item in that section. So: Will alter the mainpage|mainpage inside the sitename so that it'll use mainpagelink instead of mainpage as the link.
 * sitename
 * mainpagelink|mainpage

Relatively, this part of the syntax is similar to just working on the normal sidebar (Except the Bot generates the real sidebar, and thus once this is built you should never edit MediaWiki:Sidebar again; Just ask me to rerun the bot to regenerate the sidebar if you need something changed after you alter Sidebar/gen... Please...)

Though of course, you're probably going to want to insert things in specific locations, and delete items instead of being restricted to only adding things to the end. This syntax will be a little more complex than just adding normal things. I'll add some more info when I build the bot up to the point that it can do that.
 * Also, for ease of putting multiple MediaWiki messages into one page, the things like MediaWiki:Sitename and MediaWiki:Wgep which define what is displayed in the sidebar will probably be editable only via the top-level wiki where the bot data is stored. But if you wanted to change the name the wiki was referred to as you'd half to ask me to do that anyways, because the GENetwork template is what the shared templates use to output the name of the wiki, and that has to be changed in the top-level wiki anyways. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 20, 2007 @ 14:09 (UTC)