Maybe sidebar could be beefed up to take the name of a sidebar, such that I could use multiple sidebars in the same wiki. For instance, the default name would be 'sidebar', meaning the plugin looks for sidebar.pm and fills in the sidebar slot, but I might also want a footer in footer.pm, filling the template's footer slot.

One good way (if possible) would be to provide a directive like [[!sidebar id=sidebar]] which would cause the file, in which it occurred to fill the slot SIDEBAR in the template: basically, a page foo.mdwn says [[!fillslot slot=myslot]] and then its contents should go into <TMPL_VAR SLOT_MYSLOT> for all pages. Ideally, this can then be overridden, so if /bar/foo.mdwn also references myslot then pages under /bar should get those contents instead.

--madduck

In mine I just copied sidebar out and made some extra "sidebars", but they go elsewhere. Ugly hack, but it works. --simonraven

Here a simple patch for multiple sidebars. Not too fancy but better than having multiple copies of the sidebar plugin. --jeanprivat

I made a git branch for it

Available in a git repository branch.
Branch: privat/multiple_sidebars
Author: jeanprivat

--jeanprivat

Ping for Joey. Do you have any comment? I could improve it if there is things you do not like. I prefer to have such a feature integrated upstream. --JeanPrivat

The code is fine.

I did think about having it examine the page.tmpl for parameters with names like FOO_SIDEBAR and automatically enable page foo as a sidebar in that case, instead of using the setup file to enable. But I'm not sure about that idea..

The full compliment of sidebars would be a header, a footer, a left, and a right sidebar. It would make sense to go ahead and add the parameters to page.tmpl so enabling each just works, and add whatever basic CSS makes sense. Although I don't know if I want to try to get a 3 column CSS going, so perhaps leave the left sidebar out of that.

--- /usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki/Plugin/sidebar.pm  2010-02-11 22:53:17.000000000 -0500
+++ plugins/IkiWiki/Plugin/sidebar.pm   2010-02-27 09:54:12.524412391 -0500
@@ -19,12 +19,20 @@
            safe => 1,
            rebuild => 1,
        },
+       active_sidebars => {
+           type => "string",
+           example => qw(sidebar banner footer),
+           description => "Which sidebars must be activated and processed.",
+           safe => 1,
+           rebuild => 1
+       },
 }
 
-sub sidebar_content ($) {
+sub sidebar_content ($$) {
    my $page=shift;
+   my $sidebar=shift;
    
-   my $sidebar_page=bestlink($page, "sidebar") || return;
+   my $sidebar_page=bestlink($page, $sidebar) || return;
    my $sidebar_file=$pagesources{$sidebar_page} || return;
    my $sidebar_type=pagetype($sidebar_file);
    
@@ -49,11 +57,17 @@
 
    my $page=$params{page};
    my $template=$params{template};
-   
-   if ($template->query(name => "sidebar")) {
-       my $content=sidebar_content($page);
-       if (defined $content && length $content) {
-               $template->param(sidebar => $content);
+
+   my @sidebars;
+   if (defined $config{active_sidebars} && length $config{active_sidebars}) { @sidebars = @{$config{active_sidebars}}; }
+   else { @sidebars = qw(sidebar); }
+
+   foreach my $sidebar (@sidebars) {
+       if ($template->query(name => $sidebar)) {
+           my $content=sidebar_content($page, $sidebar);
+           if (defined $content && length $content) {
+               $template->param($sidebar => $content);
+           }
        }
    }
 }

Further thoughts about this

(since the indentation level was getting rather high.)

What about using pagespecs in the config to map pages and sidebar pages together? Something like this:

    sidebar_pagespec => {
        "foo/*" => 'sidebars/foo_sidebar',
        "bar/* and !bar/*/*' => 'bar/bar_top_sidebar',
        "* and !foo/* and !bar/*" => 'sidebars/general_sidebar',
    },

One could do something similar for pageheader, pagefooter and rightbar if desired.

Another thing which I find compelling - but probably because I am using field - is to be able to treat the included page as if it were part of the page it was included into, rather than as an included page. I mean things like [[!if ...]] would test against the page name of the page it's included into rather than the name of the sidebar/header/footer page. It's even more powerful if one combines this with field/getfield/ftemplate/report, since one could make "generic" headers and footers that could apply to a whole set of pages.

Header example:

#{{$title}}
[[!ftemplate  id="nice_data_table"]]

Footer example:

------------
[[!report  template="footer_trail" trail="trailpage" here_only=1]]

(Yes, I am already doing something like this on my own site. It's like the PmWiki concept of GroupHeader/GroupFooter)

-- KathrynAndersen

I am stumbling upon this discussion, and I noticed that I implemented part of KathrynAndersen idea in the sidebar2 plugin. Using this plugin, you can have several sidebars, which are included only in pages matching some pagespec.

Louis