Release

Community navigation sidebar widget

Community navigation sidebar widget

When we released our Knowledge base, with its own optimised UI/UX, we introduced a navigation sidebar widget that showed the category structure. We’ve received a lot of feedback since, the main question: “Can we have such a widget for our community structure as well”.

Today we’re happy to share that we developed a new sidebar widget that allows you to show the community category structure in your community category pages. 

Categories that the user is allowed to see will be displayed in the sidebar widget (e.g. when a user is not logged in then he will not see ‘private’ categories in the sidebar widget). You can see this widget in practice here on inSpired.

 

Example of the community sidebar widget for inSpired. The category that a user is currently visiting is highlighted in bold and with your brand color.

 

This widget allows you to

✅ Add a Community navigation sidebar widget to the General Sidebar
✅ Configure a widget title (e.g. Categories, Navigation, Go to)
✅ Show your community category structure in your community (parent) category pages

Note: 

  • This widget will only display on Community (parent) category pages. 
  • This widget is restricted to the General Sidebar

 

Get started

You can find the new widget “Community navigation” in Control → Customization → Sidebar. You can only add this widget to the General Sidebar.

We hope you like this new widget. If you have any questions, feedback or would like to use this widget on topic pages as well let us know in the comments below

Can you share actual instructions for how to add the sidebar widget?


Hi Lila :)

Sure, no problem! You need to go to Customization → Sidebar within the Control Environment. There you will find an overview of all widgets on the left side, on the right side you will find the different sidebars where you can populate those widgets: 

 

 

Currently there are two different sidebars you can manage from this page:

General sidebar

Basically all pages which are not topic pages or the homepage. So category pages, search result pages, etc.

Topic sidebar

All article, idea, discussion and Q&A pages.

 

Now all you need to do is to expand one of the sidebar boxes and then drag & drop the “Community navigation” widget into this box. Put it in the location where you find it should sit, e.g. above or underneath a tag cloud widget.

Then you just need to save the changes, and the widget will then become visible.


Thanks for the details, Julian. For some reason, I was wishfully thinking that it would display on the left side of category pages. The right sidebars feel too busy to add an additional menu. 

Here’s an example of category navigation from another community that I think looks really clear and easy to use: