Giving different sidebar contents in subdirectories

[ChrisJefferson]

Description

I have been trying to set sidebar: contents: to different values. I was trying to follow the guide in: https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-navigation.html but couldn't understand how to have different sidebars on different pages.

What I would like is, for every file inside the sub-directory book, to have a specific sidebar (which shows the full outline of the book), but a different sidebar: contents for other files. I tried setting sidebar: contents: inside _metadata.yml in the book directory, but that did not seem to change the contents of the sidebar?

[mcanouil]

Could you share a small self-contained "working" (reproducible) example to work with, i.e., a complete Quarto document or a Git repository? Thanks.
Also while trying to make a small and simple reproducible example, make sure to try 1.4 pre-release.

You can share a Quarto document using the following syntax, i.e., using more backticks than you have in your document (usually four ````).

````qmd
---
title: "Reproducible Quarto Document"
format: html
engine: knitr
---

This is a reproducible Quarto document using `format: html`.
It is written in Markdown and contains embedded R code.
When you run the code, it will produce a plot.

```{r}
plot(cars)
```

![A placeholder image](https://placehold.co/600x400.png)

The end.
````

[ChrisJefferson]

I generated a default blog, then edited the _quarto.yml as below. Note that cheese and badger are just random strings. I've decided my issue is that I don't know how quarto decides which of the sidebars to use on each page (I thought I did, but I don't, the only doc or example I can find is on https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-navigation.html , but does lots of things at the same time). I'd like to be able to understand and control which sidebar is used on which page.

It looks like from this sample it uses whichever sidebar the page is in the contents of? (as in this case the 'cheese' is used for 'about.qmd', and 'badger' is used by 'index.qmd'?

project:
  type: website

website:
  title: "Testblog"
  sidebar:
    - title: "cheese"
      style: "docked"
      background: light
      contents:
        - text: "------"
        - text: "------"
        - about.qmd

    - title: "badger"
      contents:
        - text: "------"
        - text: "------"
        - text: "------"
        - index.qmd
        # navigation items


  navbar:
    right:
      - about.qmd
      - icon: github
        href: https://github.com/
      - icon: twitter
        href: https://twitter.com
format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    css: styles.css

[mcanouil]

I have to say, the documentation is not clear on this and I am not very familiar with this feature.
@dragonstyle if you can chime in on this topic 😉

[dragonstyle]

Yes, by default, the sidebar which contains a page will be used. In addition to this, you can assign an id to a sidebar (just using a id key in the sidebar definition) and then use that same id as a value for the sidebar property of an individual page (which ensures that the sidebar with that id is used as the sidebar for that page).

website:
  title: "Testblog"
  sidebar:
    - id: id-cheese
      title: "cheese"
      style: "docked"
      background: light
      contents:
        - text: "------"
        - text: "------"
        - about.qmd

and in foo.qmd (a new page that you want to have the cheese sidebar):

---
title: Cool Page
author: Me
sidebar: id-cheese
---

## Hello World

The above would 'force' the cheese sidebar onto this new page, even though the page doesn't appear within the sidebar. This is also useful for cases where a page might appear on multiple sidebars, and you'd like to control specifically which sidebar the page uses.

[dragonstyle]

(Agree that I couldn't find this in our existing documentation - the section on Hybrid navigation is the closest that I found but I don't think it covers this).

[aa2686]

Would you please explain how this works in the contxext of a website having a book within it? Shall I add all sidebar options in the main _quarto.yml file? Is there a way to have different _quarto.yml files to control the type of output and sidebar options based on the filenames in this folder?
I have tried multiple options of changing the index.qmd, _metadata.yml for the subdirectories but none of the options help me get to the book format or the website format within another main personal website. I do examples where people have done this but have not been able to replicate it.

[mcanouil]

Pull request is up to add an example on how to reuse a sidebar:

• docs: add note and example on how to reuse a sidebar for a page quarto-web#1329