FamilySearch Wiki:Navboxes

Navigational templates or navboxes can be used to display a group of links to related articles at the bottom of an article. This article sets out some guidelines for creating navboxes. Help about using them can be found in the article Help:Navboxes.

Following discussions in community meetings and in a forum thread the guidelines below have been suggested.

Principles

 * Navboxes should be kept as short in space terms as possible. This will help in setting the navbox as an appendix to an article and not over shadow it.
 * Using Font size 85% is encouraged for the text and links within the navbox
 * The style of navbox used will depend on the number of links. No one style is favoured over another, contributors should use the style that is most appropriate.

Display options
In the majority of cases navboxes should be placed at the bottom of an article before the categories.

Collapsed or uncollapsed
Navbox utilise the ability of tables to be shown collapsed or uncollapsed. A third state named autocollapsed will display the navbox uncollapsed when it is on it's own or collapsed when next to another navbox.

Nesting
Contributors have the option to nest two or more separate navboxes using the template Navboxes.

Group titles
Please consider using abbreviations when naming groups so that the left hand section is kept as narrow as possible. Add line breaks to group name text is also an option.

Background colors
Although the template allows contributors to pick whatever background color schemes they wish for a navbox, consideration needs to be made about how the scheme effects readability. The recommend values to use are:

basestyle = background: #EEEEEE; liststyle = background: #FAF5FF;

Alignment
When using groups with a navbox the text should always be left aligned. The option to center text is only recommend if no group titles are being used.

Nowrap
Some navboxes have been created using the nowrap template so that link text that consist of more than one word are keep together on the same line. Use this formatting template in a considered way were appropriate. Using nowrap where the link text is a single word in redundant and is to be avoided.

#ifexist
Some navboxes have been created using the #ifexist function. This function will then only create a link if the relevant article exists. The drawback to this technique is that this function is expensive in terms of the processing power required to render a page and so the software limits this function to being only used 100 per page. If more than one template employs this function the limit can be quickly reached. Therefore use this function sparingly and as soon as the linked page with the function is created remove the code. The reason for using this function may be to hide Red links, but this need not be so.