Sidebar template for non-core packages

[ConorMacBride]

The top nav bar is hardcoded into the theme, which works well for matplotlib/matplotlib. However, for non-core packages there is no site-wide top level navigation. For matplotlib/pytest-mpl I've created a new sidebar template for the top level navigation: https://github.com/matplotlib/pytest-mpl/blob/main/docs/_templates/mpl_third_party_sidebar.html. This sidebar is set to appear above any existing "Section Navigation" sidebars on all pages. https://matplotlib.org/pytest-mpl/latest/index.html

Is this something that should be included in this theme so other non-core packages can have a consistent design? Or maybe you'd rather non-core packages just override the nav bar?

[jklymak]

Can you point to your docs? I think we mostly made this theme for things like third-party-page that are supposed to look like they are part of the Matplotlib docs, hence the hard-coded navigation. But if we can make it more flexible to affiliated docs, we can look into doing that.

[ConorMacBride]

Sounds good. Docs are built from https://github.com/matplotlib/pytest-mpl/tree/main/docs, and written to https://github.com/matplotlib/pytest-mpl/tree/gh-pages/latest. The website is hosted at https://matplotlib.org/pytest-mpl/latest/index.html

[dstansby]

I think it makes sense to move the top nav bar config out of the theme and into matplotlib and mpl-third-party. For other projects it doesn't make sense to have these links that point to matplotlib package documentation.

[jklymak]

I'd be for making this modular somehow. However, this theme is meant for our docs, and hardwiring the nav was one of the original motivations, so that we don't have to change it in 5 places. However, again if there is a way to allow other projects to override our default, then that would be most welcome.