The supplemental sidebar
The supplemental sidebar is very like the body copy section of the page with one exception: Where engenu will honor your line endings in the body copy, in the supplemental sidebar it expects to find fully-formatted HTML. engenu will not edit the line endings in the supplemental sidebar.
The supplemental sidebar editor opens in its own window. When you make your changes, you can hit the Save button to see your changes reflected on the screen. You can Save as many times as you want, but if you dismiss the window without hitting Save, your changes will not be retained. Manually dismiss the window when you are done with your changes.
What is the supplemental sidebar for?
The supplemental sidebar is an opportunity for you to amend your sidebar with links or other coding that will be constant from page to page. It is possible to use one supplemental sidebar for all the pages you create, or to vary the supplemental sidebar by project or by sub-hierarchies within a project. This supplemental sidebar editor is a way for you to make one-off changes to the supplemental sidebar for particular pages.
How does the supplemental sidebar inherit?
Down. The supplemental sidebar inherits using the same logic as the supplemental title tag:
The supplemental sidebar inherits downward. If you enter an engenu page for the first time, engenu will try to inherit the supplemental sidebar from higher levels.
It will look first in the level immediately above the current folder -- if there is one.
If it doesn't find a supplemental sidebar one level up, it will look in the top level of its own hierarchy -- if it isn't already there.
If engenu doesn't find a supplemental sidebar there, it will look in the folder called "engenuComponents" at the top level of your file server. The engenuComponents folder is where the "skin" for your particular implementation of engenu is stored, so the "master" copy of the supplemental sidebar is stored there.
And if there isn't a copy of the supplemental sidebar in the engenuComponents folder, engenu simply creates an empty supplemental sidebar and uses that.
But whatever form the supplemental sidebar takes, it will inherit downward into previously-unedited folders from that level down in the hierarchy.
Do you see how this works? If you have a supplemental sidebar you want to use for everything, just store t in the engenuComponents folder. It will be inherited into each new page as you enter it for the first time.
But if you want to use the supplemental sidebar as a way of internally organizing a large hierarchy of folders, just create the supplemental sidebars you want, giving them the filename "sidebarSupp.php" and then dropping them into the folders you want to display that particular supplemental sidebar.
If a particular supplemental sidebar will apply to an entire sub-hierarchy of folders, you can put it into the top level of that sub-hierarchy and then edit downward level-by-level to inherit that supplemental sidebar into each sub-folder as you enter it for the first time.