Template talk:Sidebar

Question about parameters
I noticed that South Carolina has created their own sidebar. See SC-sidebar. I was wondering if it would be possible to add additional parameters to this template to allow for customization at the country, state, or county levels for the list of research topics. I think this method would be preferable to creating a new sidebar for every US state, or other localities. I need a sidebar for Utah and wanted to use this one and customize it for Utah, but saw that the parameters were not set up to localize it. --Fran


 * What kinds of customization would you like to make? Could you give some examples. Are some topics only relevant at certain levels? When I created this template it was with a view to making it standard across localities, but even on page where I had put it (England) it has bee removed and placed with specific coding.I guessed that it was hard to edit/work with if you did not understand templates. Thinking about it now, changes could be made to make this a base/meta-template from which to build more tailored versions. Please let me know what bit you would like to have control over and which bits should be kept standard. --Steve 17:04, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Sidebar format
The sidebar is simply too narrow to include anything but a list of topics! The vast majority of pages have no entries under either "News &amp; Events" or "Did you know" so why put them there? --Bromaelor 14:11, 4 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I was led to believe that the sidebar of topics with sections for news and information was based on the old FamilySearch Research Outlines. I agree that it many cases they aren't used, the template could be amended to hide these sections when empty, but that would also hide an invitation to add these items. Maybe restiring the sidebar to just a list of topics would be for the best. --Steve 15:55, 4 April 2011 (UTC)