Hi!
The Goal
My wiki's start page contains welcome to users, introduction to wiki basics, that kind of stuff.
On the start page, i want to have a big custom sidebar. It would serve as a navigation menu and a thoughtfully composed table of contents.
Attempt 1: <WRAP>
The <WRAP> tag appears to be the most graceful solution. I've created a custom css class with
.width: 45%; padding-left: 5%; float: right; background: #fff; and set it to wrap my table of contents.
It was exactly what i want. The problem is that DokuWiki won't let me have headers inside markup tags, and <WRAP> is not an exception. :(
Wrap plugin page suggests using bold+underline to bring out tags, which is of course not a solution for me.
Attempt 2: <HTML>
I substituded <WRAP> with <HTML><div style="blah></HTML>.
It worked if there were no DokuWiki headers inside the div.
When i type in a DokuWiki header, it add "</div>" right before itself, tearing what's below itself off the sidebar.
I tried substituting DokuWiki headers with html ones, but this is a terribly ungraceful solution. The text below html headers doen't get indented, whereas the header itself does.
Attempt 3: a Sidebar Template
I tried using a sidebar template. I din't like Actic because it's fixed with and lacks the elegance of DokuWiki default theme. So i chose the
navigation template.
The template has really
noble goals and it serves them really well.
My problem is that i don't need a sidebar on every page! After a painful period, i finally adopted the nirvana of Dokuwiki's simple approach to navigation.
Moreover, my sidebar's table of contents is gonna be really big. If i have it on every page, it's gonna be longer than most pages' contents.
Miserable Failure
So i tried mostly everything and everything failed.
I can think of other solutions of course:
* coding the sidebar's contents in html/css without using DokuWiki markup;
* using a plugin to embed a separate page to the start page and apply the float css to it's div.
But come on! Do i really need to install plugins, make page embeds (raising caching issues probably) or wasting time with oldschool html — just to have a simple float with headers?
The question is as follows:
Is the situation really that bad? No graceful solution to such a small problem?