How to set the same sidebar categories for all the users

Documentation Site Management
5

@Moin
The way backfilling works here is a bit different than what one would expect. We don’t simply reset all the users’ sidebar categories when the default navigation menu categories setting is updated. Here’s what we do:

  • If the admin adds a few categories to the setting, only those newly added ones are added to all the users’ sidebars who didn’t have those set already.
  • If you remove a few categories from the setting, those are removed from all the users’ sidebars.

So the backfill doesn’t force the setting’s state on all the users, but it does a delta of existing values in the setting to those added or removed newly.

The key reason this is done is to preserve individual user’s preferences.

This is the PR this behavior was introduced in:

We recognized two ways of achieving the same categories on all the users:

  1. Add all, apply historically, remove some, apply historically.
  2. Remove all, apply historically, add some, apply historically.

In a recent attempt to do this for a big site, 1 didn’t work properly and 2 did. Hence I documented 2.

If you have time, do try out both the ways with a bunch of users to see if this works. If it helps, I can write an SQL query to confirm if the updating worked as expected. Do let me know what you think.

1 Like