19 January 2007

XmlWiki side-bar improved again in accord with user requests ;-) The side-bar is now it's own self-contained XmlWiki article called xmlwiki-sidebar. This allows users to define active content like forms or animations in their side-bar. It uses XmlWiki syntax to embed the logo, search, navigation and user bookmarks, and so is very compact. It has also allowed the default-skin.php component to be reduced by about half since it was responsible for building all the skin content around the article. This new functionality has been achieved with a new function added to the main xmlwiki.php code called xwXmlWikiParse which takes an article title string as its only parameter, and returns the HTML text resulting from processing the XmlWiki data and view transforms before and after the MediaWiki parser operates on the raw wikitext of the article. To use a different article as the sidebar in your XmlWiki, set $xwSideBar to its title in your LocalSettings.php article.