One of the reoccurring questions I hear from new DokuWiki users again and again is "How do I add some automatic navigation?" //

Fixed Navigation

I believe, for a new wiki, you're better off with no automatic navigation at all. In fact it may be counterproductive to the nature of a wiki.

The beauty of a wiki is the interconnection of the various topics. Linking might be the main property of a wiki. //

Here's how you do it. You simply create a page named "sidebar" and put a list of links in it. Of course you can also use headlines or other formatting to make it more accessible. You can influence the order of your links by reordering your list and of course you can give each link an individual name. It's all standard wiki syntax. No magic and all under your control. //

A somewhat better approach would be the navi plugin. It it allows you maintain a central list of links (using the standard list and link syntax). It outputs that list's sub lists collapsed or opened based on what page you're currently on.

You still fully control the order and titles of your links and it's still very wiki like.

The Template Approach

An alternative approach to make the navigation a bit more dynamic while maintaining full control over its content is to use a template that offers some more sophisticated navigation mechanisms.

One example would be the sprintdoc template. Again, the navigation is created using a sidebar page as described in the fixed approach above. This time however, headlines in the sidebar are treated special and automatically create collapsible sections. It even lets you add icons to make the sections more recognizable. //

Automated Listings

So what if you really need an automatic list of pages in a namespace? I would recommend looking at the simplenavi plugin. As the name suggests, it's really simple. It creates a nested list of links to the pages it found.

I would recommend not using it as the main navigation, but to combine it with the fixed navigation approach and only use it in the sidebar of deeper namespaces.

Alternatively the nslist plugin is a good way to add list of sub pages in the current namespace. This could be used to create automatic indexes on a namespace start page.