Sidebars are ways of adding columns of data to a web site layout in Sitellite. A column being a vertical series of content "blocks" or "boxes". By default, Sitellite doesn't impose any restrictions on layout at all, making no assumptions that your content is in 2 or 3 columns, which is why Sitellite-powered web sites each look so unique.

However, columns are a common web site design technique for organizing associated content around a page body, and as such they are useful in many situations. What we've done to make Sitellite support columns (without requiring them) is we've built a sitellite/sidebar box that allows you to drop in columns wherever you want.

With sitellite/sidebar you can have as many columns as you want, and you have full control over their rendering via CSS. Sitellite automatically provides the editing buttons in the Web View, and you can also access sidebar content from the Control Panel as well.

To insert a sidebar into your site, add the following line to your template where you'd like the sidebar to appear:

<xt:box name="sitellite/sidebar" position="left" />

The position value is an arbitrary value, and has no bearing on the positioning of the sidebar. It is simply a way of uniquely identifying one sidebar column over another. Common position values we've used are: left, right, inline, bottom, index-left, index-right, index-centre, etc. The only requirement for position values is that they correspond to the list of Position values listed under the Properties tab of the sidebar add/edit forms.