Navigation sidebar

Follow these guidelines when contributing additions or changes to the redesigned navigation sidebar.

These guidelines reflect the current state of the navigation sidebar. However, the sidebar is a work in progress, and so is this documentation.

Enable the new navigation sidebar

To enable the new navigation sidebar, select your avatar, then turn on the New navigation toggle.

Adding items to the sidebar

Before adding an item to the sidebar, ensure you review and follow the processes outlined in the handbook page for navigation.

Adding page-specific Vue content

Pages can render arbitrary content into the sidebar using the SidebarPortal component. Content passed to its default slot is rendered below that page’s navigation items in the sidebar.

note
Only one instance of this component on a given page is supported. This is to avoid ordering issues and cluttering the sidebar.
note
You can use arbitrary content. You should implement nav items by subclassing ::Sidebars::Panel. If you must use Vue to render nav items (for example, if you need to use Vue Router) you can make an exception. However, in the corresponding panel.rb file, you must add a comment that explains how the nav items are rendered.
note
Do not use the SidebarPortalTarget component. It is internal to the sidebar.

Snowplow Tracking

All clicks on the nav items should be automatically tracked in Snowplow, but may require additional input. We use data-tracking attributes on all the elements in the nav to send the data up to Snowplow. You can test that they’re working by setting up snowplow on your GDK.

Field Data attribute Notes Example
Category data-tracking-category The page that the user was on when the item was clicked. groups:show
Action data-tracking-action The action taken. In most cases this is click_link or click_menu_item click_link
Label data-tracking-label A descriptor for what was clicked on. This is inferred by the ID of the item in most cases, but falls back to item_without_id. This is one to look out for. group_issue_list
Property data-tracking-property This describes where in the nav the link was clicked. If it’s in the main nav panel, then it needs to describe which panel. nav_panel_group