Toolbox Global Configuration

Hi all,

Am new to foswiki, and have a couple questions that I could not find answers to in the FAQ's.

1. I am using the NatSkin plugin

2. I am trying to get docs to setup new global sidebar links for our site.

3. I can login to my Foswiki account but I always get 'Access Denied' when I try to get details on any of the components e.g. SiteSideBar

Do you have any ideas? Can you point me to any docs on Foswiki cusomization?

Thanks, Grant

-- GrantJonas - 03 Oct 2016

Greetings Grant & welcome to Foswiki! I'm not sure I completely understand your question but let me try to shed some light on setting up your custom sidebar in NatSkin. There's some documentation about configuring and customizing NatSkin in the System.NatSkin topic as well as System.NatSkinConfiguration and System.NatSkinPlugin (particularly under "WEBCOMPONENT" section).

To create your custom site sidebar:

Navigate to System.SiteSideBar
Under the "More" menu, select "Copy topic"
Enter "Main.SiteSideBar" as the new topic name (with web reference). This will copy the original version of your topic to the Main web.
You can now customize "Main.SiteSideBar" to your heart's content. As explained in "WEBCOMPONENT" section of System.NatSkinPlugin, these copies of site-wide components in the Main web will automatically take precedence over the default versions in the System web.
The other default topic you'll probably want to copy from System to Main web is System.SiteLinks. This will contain the default set of site links. This can be further overridden in a particular web by copying System.WebLinks to a web and customizing it to suit that particular web.

The statement you made about getting 'Access Denied' message puzzles me. Have you added yourself to AdminGroup? If not, you should do that first. Editing some system topics require being in this group.

Hope this helps! Please post follow-up comments if I haven't adequately answered your question.

-- Main.LynnwoodBrown - 04 Oct 2016 - 17:41

Oh my gosh that helps so much! Sorry about the strange wording in the original question I have having some trouble putting in into words.

Much appreciated!

-- GrantJonas - 04 Oct 2016

Also do you know where any documentation can be found specifically regarding SiteSideBar customization? Appreciate it.

-- GrantJonas - 04 Oct 2016

There's not a whole lot more to say about customization of the NatSkin SiteSideBar beyond what I mentioned above. If you look at the default System.SiteSideBar, it includes 4 skin templates:

sidebar::header basically just displays link to current web's WebHome page.
sidebar::links includes the components SiteLinks and WebLinks which I discussed above. These are the really the only components of the sidebar you probably need to customize. You add any links that are relevant to entire site into Main.SiteLinks and add links for a particular web to WebLinks topic you create in that web. Refer to Main.WebLinks as example.
sidebar::mysidebar provides for an individually customized sidebar section which you don't need to customize, other than creating your personal sidebar.
sidebar::tools simply provides links to the basic web-related utility topics. Not much to change there.

If you don't want one of these components in the sidebar, just delete that line from you localized copy of Main.SiteSideBar. If you want to dig into the dirty details of how each of these skin templates work, they are defined in the templates/sidebar.nat.tmpl template file.

That's about it. If you have something specific you want to accomplish in sidebar that's not addressed here, let me know.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 05 Oct 2016