Help:Sidebar

What is a sidebar
Sidebar is a term that refers to various forms of information that is displayed in a box, with or without borders, to the side of an article. You can display text, images, widgets, etc. in them. They behave just like a template, see: Help:Templates.

What is the purpose of sidebars?
The purpose of the sidebars is to isolate the material in it from any changes in the main article that might affect the location or arrangement of the material in the sidebar.

What are the advantages of sidebars?
It has the advantage of being updatable without having to go each of the articles where the sidebar may appear. This very important if you have a particular sidebar on many pages. You simply go to the sidebar article and make whatever changes you want. Then, when someone goes to any of the pages where the sidebar appears, they will see the updated material. Again, this material will appear on all the articles where the sidebar is imbedded.

IMPORTANT: Now, if you want to put the same sidebar in a number of articles, but may want to edit them separately on the various articles it is embedded, then you will have to create a separate sidebar with its own name for each article. Otherwise if you have the same on on many pages you will changed them all if you make a change to the sidebar.

How to create a sidebar
Probably the easiest way is to create sidebars is to do so in the wikitext editor using "div" tags. For example: text. But to control the width and the location of the sidebar you must include the width and its desired location on the page.

This is an example for setting the width and location of the sidebar: text. In this example, the width is set to 25% of the total page width and the sidebar is to float on the left side of the article and will do so at the location you set it. Click here to see the article for the Template:Example-sidebar on this page

Since you have set a width to your sidebar, you must set a width to the material in the article itself. Otherwise the material in the article into which you imbedded the sidebar in will be pushed down the page below the sidebar. To control the width of the material to the side of the sidebar, you can use  tags. You can enclosed all the material just like was done with the sidebar. Example: article material. Notice that you need to put in the float:right so the material will appear at the top of the page instead of remaining below the sidebar.

In addition make sure that the width of the sidebar and the width of the article adds up to 99%, not 100%. This give a little room if their are spacing problems in the text.

How to embed a sidebar
Type the following: where you want the sidebar to appear. It can be placed anywhere on the page. It will begin where you place it. So, if you put it at the top, it will appear at the top. If you place it half way down the page, it appear somewhere in the middle of the article.

How to edit a sidebar
To edit a sidebar, you treat it just like a regular article. Click on the "Edit This Page" button on the sidebar page and make whatever changes you want just as you do on any article in the Wiki. To access the sidebar to edit, you can type in the search box "Template:Name of the Sidebar-sidebar." This will take you right to the sidebar article without having to go through a page where the sidebar appears.