Marspedia:Offsite Links In Sidebar

Step 1.

Determine the offsite page you wish to link to. Copy an save the url.

In this case we wanted to link to the NSS ISDC 2007 web page. The url for that page is http://isdc.nss.org/2007/

Step 2.

Decide the display text for your link.

We felt "ISDC 2007" would be sufficiently verbose for most users.

Step 3.

Having determined our url and our link text, the next challenge was to put them in the right place in the right order.

Well, the place is simple MediaWiki:Sidebar

If you go to that page and click on View Source or Edit (depending on how much we trust you) you will see something like this:

*navigation

**mainpage|mainpage

** Category:Main|Category Tree

<!-- ** Special:Categories|Category List A-Z -->

** Index-url|Index

<!-- **portal-url|portal -->

** Links_and_Resources-url|Links and Resources

<!-- **currentevents-url|currentevents -->

**recentchanges-url|recentchanges

**randompage-url|randompage

**helppage|help

<!-- ** sitesupport-url|sitesupport -->

<!-- **Join the Mars Society-url|Join the Mars Society -->


*Mars Events

**Mars Society Convention-url|Mars Society Convention


*Space Events

**ISDC-url|ISDC 2007

Well, you see there where it says

 **ISDC-url|ISDC 2007

that's what you need to put in.

Step 4.

Let's examine that. The second part just says "ISDC 2007", that's your link text...
But the first part says "ISDC-url"!
What's that about?

Well that's the key to the whole thing. If you go take a look at MediaWiki:ISDC-url you'll see that's where the url for the link is stored.

Step 5.

So once you've saved your Sidebar, you need to create that ISDC-url page and insert the url there. After that, it should all work and people will be able to follow the link to the ISDC 2007 web page.