User:Rogerhc/nav idea

Custom per user navigation portlet
Anyone done this?

Any ideas how to simply do it?

Purpose
To allow users to bookmark site pages they often visit. So they can create quick and deep navigation for their specific topic of interest within a wide but deep focus wiki such as Wikiversity.org.

Description

 * Custom nav to appear in left sidebar below the Search box but above the Toolbox.
 * Customized per logged-in user, such as how only user Foo can edit User:Foo/monobook.css, maybe at User:Foo/nav.
 * Parsed like a normal wiki page instead of like MediaWiki:Sidebar because normal users don't want to learn non-standard markup.
 * Other users could use Foo's custom nav portlet by transcluding it into their own User:Name/nav by typing there.
 * Interest groups could collaboratively create and maintain group specific custom nav portlets, eg Template:nav_English_as_a_second_language, to transclude into their interest group pages and or individual User:Name/nav with.

Current alternatives
Currently in standard MediaWiki a user Foo can put "bookmarks" in
 * 1) browser bookmarks
 * 2) Links in User:Foo page or subpages thereof
 * 3) Links in page Whatever for benefit of everyone
 * 4) Category:Whatever page by labeling the page
 * 5) Links in Template:Whatever

However, standard browser bookmarks are too messy as we all know and 2, 3, 4 and 5 are not as convenient to click as left sidebar would be.

Deep wide wiki's such as Wikiversity.org and other deep wide Open Educational Resources wiki's are a nuisance to navigate.

A *custom per user navigation portlet* could be an enormous practical benefit to wiki's that have not just wide but also *deep* topics, such as Wikiversity. Wikipedia only goes wide, not deep, and is manageable because each encyclopedia page has a unique, language defined, term or phrase that defines it as encyclopedic -- going deeper is not an encyclopedia's mission but is the mission of many other wikis.

Has anyone tried this?

Ideas how to simply write it in PHP as a MediaWiki extension?