Marspedia:Offsite Links In Sidebar

Step 1.

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

In our case we wanted to link to the Foobar Society Member Registration page, aka the Join the Foobar Society page. The url for that page is http://www.foobarsociety.org/register/

Step 2.

Decide the display text for your link.

Well, that was a tough decision, should we call it Registration, or Membership or what. But someone pointed out that there was already a link there called "Join the Foobar Society" so we used that because it was already typed.

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

** Special:Categories|categories

** Index-url|Index

** recentchanges-url|recentchanges

** randompage-url|randompage

** Special:Search|complex search

** helppage|help

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

<!-- ** join|Join the Foobar Society -->

** Join the Foobar Society-url|Join the Foobar Society

<!-- testing -->

Well, you see there where it says

** Join the Foobar Society-url|Join the Foobar Society

that's what you need to put in.

Step 4.

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

Well that's the key to the whole thing. If you go take a look at MediaWiki:Join_the_Foobar_Society-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 Join_the_Foobar_Society-url page and insert the url there. After that, it should all work and millions upon billions of people will join your society and you'll be able to afford to build huge rockets to carry 500 people to the foobar on each and ever trip.

Yeah, right.