Redmine › Sidebar Content

Download Sidebar Content 0.1.2

The Sidebar Content plugin 0.1.1 appeared to work just fine under Redmine 2.5.x, except one issue:

In version 2.5.x (or 2.4.x?) Redmine changed the default policy of rendering the sidebar – before, it was rendered, if the content for the sidebar was specified in the template file, since 2.5.x it also gets rendered, if the content is provided through hooks. And as the Sidebar Content plugin uses these hooks to inject the content into the sidebar – the sidebar got rendered (unless disabled for the page using the Location option) despite the per-project and/or global sidebar visibility configuration (that can be specified in Settings → Sidebar → Sidebar visibility of the project and Administration → Sidebar correspondingly)!

So, this is a maintenance release, that makes Sidebar Content work properly with Redmine 2.5.x...

Another issue, that gets fixed with the Sidebar Content 0.1.2, was that the Sidebar menu item in Administration did not get selected, when you opened this menu item.

Download Sidebar Content 0.1.1

Since Redmine 2.0 I was so busy with other stuff and, especially, with the book, that could not find time to update my plugins for Redmine 2.0, 2.1, and, then, 2.2... So recently, when I got some time, I started porting my plugins to all these versions! First, I updated the most popular plugins, then – the rest. While working on the rest Redmine 2.2 and 2.3 were released, and my popular plugins became outdated... again. So after updating the rest I started updating popular plugins... again! This had looked to be an infinite cycle, which... ended now, with this release! As this is the last plugin, which was known not to work on Redmine 2.3!

So the version 0.1.1 of the Sidebar Content plugin comes with support for Redmine 2.2.x and 2.3.x. In fact, this is just an official release of changes, which were available in the project SVN repository already for some time (I just had no time to prepare this release)! You could see a notice on the project overview page regarding availability of these changes, by the way...

When I delay adding support for some new Redmine version, sometimes users do this themselves making research of issues and looking for fixes. This, actually, helps me much, as I do not need to spent time for testing and research! The similar was done by Mathias for the version 0.1.1 of the Sidebar Content plugin! Thank you, Mathias!

Also Ki Won Kim made and shared the Korean translation for the Sidebar Content plugin, which is now included into the version 0.1.1. Thank you, Ki!

There are two major features I, personally, need and want to see in the Sidebar plugin: ability to turn on the sidebar for the pages, which do not have the one by default (e.g., new issue page) and support for multiple sidebar contents (see #1695)... I’m proud to write, that the first mentioned feature comes with version 0.1.0! Thus, currently the Sidebar plugin allows adding the sidebar to the following project pages: news list and news pages, version pages, file list, new issue page, forum list, topic list, topic page, repository pages, settings and more. Sidebar visibility can be controlled globally and/or per project – the plugin introduces the configuration policy, which makes the configuration even more flexible. See this Wiki page for details.

With this release the Sidebar plugin also supports Redmine 1.4.x, 2.0.x and 2.1.x. Actually, the release of Redmine 1.4.x caught me unready, when I was working on the sidebar visibility feature. So that’s why they (the support and the feature) come together.

New version also includes new translations: Portuguese (thanks Mario Luzeiro), Turkish (thanks user(Ismail Sezen)#107) and Chinese (thanks Steven Wong).

Besides, the version 0.1.0 no longer uses the Project Settings plugin (so it can be removed, if you do not need it for other plugins)... In fact, the Sidebar Content was my last plugin, which used Project Settings (the functionality of the latter is simple to replicate)...

The new feature, which allows configuring the sidebar visibility, is a kind of useless, unfortunately, for ChiliProject 3.x... The point is that ChiliProject 3.x introduces huge layout changes, which make the sidebar visible on every page (as it contains the project menu, which is represented as tabs in Redmine). Besides this sidebar is at the left side, below the project menu... Therefore, I believe, putting content on the sidebar is not so useful as before. So, I need to get the feedback on using the plugin on ChiliProject 3.x (and above) to get an idea, how it can be improved for this application...

Before this the project had the name “redmine-sidebar”, but as a part of The Rename I changed it into the “sidebar-content”. The repository name also changed... So you need to update it, if you use my SVN. Luckily it’s easy:

$ svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-sidebar http://svn.s-andy.com/sidebar-content

P.S. So which plugin is now next?.. A complicated question! Next plugins would be the Download Button and Contact Form, but... SCM Creator (+Github) and WikiNG, I started the porting with, now need to be fixed for Redmine 2.1.x, which was released afterwards... So let the fortune decide this time!

In this new version many changes were made to improve the code. It also includes new language files for German, Spanish and Korean. Own code for adding a tab into project settings was replaced by using the Project Settings Tab plugin which just provides a new hook to make this easier.

But one of the main changes is a fix for Wiki formatting. It was not possible to include headings (h1, h2 etc) into Textile text which was used for sidebar content. Special thanks for help in resolving this issue go to Adam Mallinson, Jamie Gruener, Steven Wong and Ron Klinkien! (Yeah, many users faced this problem)

Other special thanks for translating the plugin into German, Spanish and Korean languages go to Stefan Wienert, Txinto Vaz and Ki Won Kim!

To download the plugin go to this page.
For installation procedure check this page (and don’t forget about the Project Settings Tab plugin).