# Introducing admin sidebar navigation **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281 **Category:** Announcements **Tags:** feedback, admin-sidebar **Created:** [December 20, 2023, 5:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281 "2023-12-20T05:30:19Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 1
### Author: ![martin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/martin/32/491371_2.png) [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin) #### Post date: [December 20, 2023, 5:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/1 "2023-12-20T05:30:19Z")
> 📣 **Update:** The old admin top navigation has been officially deprecated and removed in the 3.4 release. The sidebar navigation has seen huge improvements lately and, going forward, is the only way to navigate the Discourse admin. * * * We have been working internally on some changes around how the navigation structure will work in the admin areas of Discourse. The first part of this work is introducing an admin sidebar. It looks like this: ![This image shows an administration panel for a web service called Discourse, displaying account details, usage statistics, and a graph representing the community health metrics over a period of time. (Captioned by AI)](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/9/9/0/990ed03a0de6d5d06755290c5d3b1bf9c4092641.png) This sidebar works similarly to the chat sidebar. It is contextual, and it only appears when an admin enters any part of the admin area of the site, and is replaced with the appropriate contextual sidebar when leaving the admin area. In this first iteration, the navigation links are a simple 1-1 copy of the old top-of-page navigation links. In future, we plan to do some further restructuring here, but for now we wanted to get this initial form out to see what people think. There are some of caveats, that we hope to address soon: - There is currently no replacement for the `admin-menu` outlet from the old navigation bar - There are some inconsistencies around how the UI looks now that the top bar is gone - We do not support custom sidebar sections and links in the admin sidebar - We are considering how to support Discourse sites that have their own custom theme-based sidebar This is hidden behind an experimental `admin_sidebar_enabled_groups` site setting for now. We are opening up the floor for feedback. 🚀 --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281)._