Change the machine name/title of the sidebar regions to something more semantic

Created on 19 September 2013, almost 12 years ago
Updated 16 July 2025, 20 days ago

Why do we still use names like "Sidebar"?
For example in a responsive layout the side bar drops below the main content on a phone and turns in a "Below Bar".

I think we need to think up a other name for them that is based on the most common use case instead of the location in the layout.

Proposition 1
Sidebars can be used for aside like content

  • Sidebar-first > Sub-content-first
  • Sidebar-second > Sub-content-second

Proposition 2
Often a sidebar is used for extra navigation items like a list of recent articles.

  • Sidebar-first > Sub-navigation
  • Sidebar-second > Sub-content

In both cases the placement of the regions is then totally disconnected from the region name.

📌 Task
Status

Closed: won't fix

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

markup

Created by

🇳🇱Netherlands dbazuin

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.
  • Needs issue summary update

    Issue summaries save everyone time if they are kept up-to-date. See Update issue summary task instructions.

Sign in to follow issues

Comments & Activities

Not all content is available!

It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

  • 🇮🇪Ireland markconroy

    We don't seem to have reached consensus on this, and we haven't had a reply to it in over 8 years.

    My take is that 'sidebar' - for better or worse - is the generally accepted name for these "things" in web nomenclature and we might as well go with what is being used. There are lot of things with names that could be better - radio buttons for example, when no one has radios like that any more; headless - really?

    Sidebar seems like a good name to me. It implies it's a sliver of "stuff" beside other content. Which it is on large screens at least.

    After all this time we are still using "sidebar" in our core themes, so that seems to at least be some sort of consensus that we will keep doing so.

    I'm going to mark this as "Won't fix", re-open if you think we should still work on it.

Production build 0.71.5 2024