It's frequently useful to add content or navigational functions to the sidebar. In particular, there are several types of custom navigation that would be immediately helpful for our office-notes wiki:

• There is currently no easy way to order and look at journal tiddlers by date, something which will likely be a common task.
• Similarly, listing our meetings by date would be helpful. We already have a MeetingList, but right now we have to remember that it exists and search for it.
• We might like a hierarchical view of our projects, or at least a list of them, in the sidebar so we can quickly navigate through them.

Let's create a new tab in the sidebar called Views to store custom ways of looking at some of our tiddlers. Within the Views tab, we'll add some vertical tabs, just like the default More tab does, for Journal, Meetings, and Projects.

The first step is to create a tiddler for each inner tab. As noted earlier, we already have a tiddler that can serve as the meeting list, MeetingList; you may, however, want to clean out some extra crud that we have added to it in previous exercises, so that it just shows a simple list of meetings. For the journal list, clone the meeting list and tweak the filter so that it selects tiddlers with the Journal tag instead of the Meeting tag.

For the project list, let's look at a slightly different method. All of our tiddlers are tagged Project, so why not just make Project – the tag tiddler – into the list? This fits perfectly with the standard dual function of tags in TiddlyWiki as both tiddlers (units of content) and a mechanism for building structure. Go ahead and edit this tiddler, or create it if it doesn't exist in your wiki, and add an appropriate TOC macro to it. (Have a look at Creating Hierarchies with a Table of Contents if you've forgotten how.)

The next step is to create a tiddler that combines those inner tabs into a single tiddler. Let's call this tiddler $:/yourname/Views. We'll set things up so that we can add new tabs by simply tagging the tab tiddler $:/yourname/Views:

<<tabs
  tabsList:"[tag[$:/yourname/Views]]"
  default:"JournalList"
  class:"tc-vertical">>

Go back and tag each of the inner-tab tiddlers with $:/yourname/Views. You should immediately see tabs appear for them within the $:/yourname/Views tiddler.

The last step is to make the Views tiddler itself show up as a new tab on the sidebar. This is left as an exercise.

Exercises

Takeaways

Takeaways are not available in the static version of Grok TiddlyWiki. Visit the wiki version of this page to study takeaways.