Bits and Bytes

By Carole | Published: April 1, 2011

We are very, very excited to announce your new and improved navigation bar. I’ll dive into the details in a second, but here are the three big reasons we think you’re going to be as excited as we are:

1. You can sort your pages by tag into collapsible folders.
2. You can drag and drop to rearrange pages — instead of editing the navigation bar or adding links by hand.
3. All those pages you’ve flagged as Favorites are conveniently listed in your navigation bar.

The new navigation bar is simpler and friendlier, and it is going to give you a whole new way to keep an eye on what’s happening in your wiki, without any tricky setup. Here’s what it’s going to look like:

Which wikis get the new navigation bar?
If you’ve ever edited the navigation bar on your wiki, you won’t see any changes and you won’t lose any of your hard work. But if you’ve never edited the navigation bar, or if you’re creating a new wiki, you will see the new navigation bar by default.

How do I use it?
If you are the organizer of a wiki, you can rearrange that wiki’s navigation bar.

Your Navigation Options will let you decide which categories your navigation bar shows: just pages with a certain tag, or All pages in the wiki. Pages will be listed in the order they were created or in the order the tag was applied. But you can easily rearrange the order of pages or tags by simply dragging them to where you want them to be. You don’t have to hit edit, you don’t have to save. Just make the changes, and every visitor to your wiki will see the navigation bar the way it should be.

If you’re visiting a wiki but you’re not the organizer, you still have some options for customizing the navigation bar. All the various folders can be expanded or collapsed, depending on which pages you need to access easily. Whenever you add a navigation bar tag to a page, it will be automatically added to the navigation bar. And any of the pages you flag as Favorites will appear at the top of the navigation bar every time you visit the wiki.

I’m still not sure the default navigation bar works for me
Not to worry. The new navigation bar gives you more freedom, not less. You can still edit your navigation bar like any page in your wiki (our navigation bar help page can give you some pointers. And if you find yourself feeling nostalgic for the old alphabetized list of pages, you can do that too:

1. On the side bar, under the list of pages, click the edit navigation link.
2. Delete anything that you may have added to your navigation bar.
3. Click the Widget button in the toolbar.
4. From the Widget menu, select List of Wiki Pages.
5. If you want the home page to appear at the top of the list, check the Move Home Page to Top box. If you want the home page to appear alphabetically in the “H” position, leave the box unchecked.
6. By default, we will list up to ten pages. You can change this number if you would like to list more (or fewer) pages.
7. Click Embed Page List.
8. Hit Save.

I’ve customized my navigation bar in the past, but I want to give the new one a try
That’s also easy:

1. On the side bar, under the list of pages, click the edit navigation link.
2. Delete anything that you may have added to your navigation bar.
3. Click the Widget button in the toolbar.
4. From the Widget menu, select Insert Navigation Widget.
5. Click Insert Navigation Widget.
6. Hit Save.