Is it possible make a sidebar?

[Lexian-droid]

This is about Bulma.

Overview of the problem

This is about the Bulma CSS framework
This is about the Bulma Docs
I'm using Bulma version cdn

Description

I am trying to build an admin dashboard using Bulma CSS, however it seems like there is no documentation for any sort of "Native" way to accomplish it, and templates are far and few between and often modified.

I wanna know if it's possible make a dashboard that consists of a sidebar that sticks to the side and is always on the side, and then the remaining part of the page is used for site content?

If so, is it required that I modify Bulma, and is it a built in functionality?

Steps to Reproduce

There is not really a step-by-step, so I'm going to say unrelated

You could however, look up "How to make a sidebar with bulma css" and you may find other results, but for me, it leads to the Menu class, which doesn't seem to be the right style, or you'll find plugins that seem to be outdated.

Expected behavior

I'd like if there was some details about making a sidebar that are updated

Actual behavior

A result that doesn't look that good, it "works" but it looks unprofessional.

[guest20]

If you're asking about general layout I searched duckduckgo for "bulma admin", a couple of the notable looking results that all seem to use the bulma menu, and scale to display as burgers on telephones and look just fine.:

• bulma-admin-dashboard-template is full-width all the time, and has a menu like you seem to want
• bulma-templates's 'Admin' - was fine in the past it may have not bern updated to 1.0 (the boxes all show with black text on black background - but i some super aggressive ad blockers, which often cause this kind of thing)
• admin-one-bulma-dashboard - this one looks fine too

When you say it "doesn't look good", it's not clear to me (just some rando on github) what doesn't look good, and what about it doesn't look good. Do you mean the bulma menu doesn't look good, or the demos you fond don't look good? Does the menu on the doc site not look good?

Since bulma is a CSS library you can "modify" how your page looks by simply adding more css rules right after you include bulma, called "CSS specificity". So you can just <link rel=stylesheet href=my-bulma-admin.css> (and add your customisations there) to override any rules from bulma that you don't like. Once you've settled on your custom changes you can @include your stuff and compile them into your final bulma-min.css without having to patch bulma directly. This means you don't need to upstream all your site-specific customisations, and you can more easily update bulma and re-compile it with your own local additions. more

@Lexian-droid I had a look at your profile to try and figure out how much of this is over-explaining and realised I'm pretty bad at CSS myself, so it's hard to guess how good you are - so sorry if this is stuff you already know.

Also, your hire. subdomain looks like it's down.

[Lexian-droid]

Thanks, I didn't realize my hiring website was down, you can actually take a look at lexian.dev and that page uses Bulma, as well as PHP for the backend, it's connected to the github organization, but I've fixed it now, it's mainly just a redirect, it use to go to Fiverr, now it goes to Discord.

Regarding what I meant, basically, all examples I've found either look incomplete, limited, or the style doesn't look good, those templates you mention do exists, and I've checked some of them out, but they all seem to be old or outdated, not to mention, I am concerned about modifying.

By modifying I mean literal modifying, not like, adding another CSS file and overriding certain elements, or variables, I mean it seems like their putting code into Bulma's own CSS file, which I don't think is really a good idea.

Also, I feel like "Menu" isn't really an option neither, as it seems like an unfinished option, and when using it like a sidebar, it doesn't really look great, I would've expected to maybe have some utility classes that can be used with it maybe, for example, a while back I was making a project and needed a 2 by 2 grid, of all different content by varying heights, and the developer gave me information about that too, and there were helper classes and utility classes to go with it.

In general, I think I might start migrating away from Bulma, I don't want to go to Tailwind, as I'm really just not a fan of how many classes it has, even though arguably I probably should, I just don't know where to start, I think I might try out bootstrap, if that's even relevant these days, I use to use w3.css, and Bulma seemed like a more "Modern" w3.css option, but it ultimately comes with quite a lot less flexibility.

[guest20]

@Lexian-droid

I am concerned about modifying

Keeping track of which versions of things you've included and build on top helps a lot with that. I keep a vendor/ directory in my git repo, I put the .tar /.zip in there whenever I download a new release, then extract the files I need from the .tar and put them in a directory named after the archive. That way it's easy to keep track of what file / code came from where with git log. From these files in vendor/ I can generate the final css/js/.map files that go in public/. That way I can keep libraries, examples, snippets and whatever custom jank I might need nicely separated.

As a bonus I can still get the docs out of the .tar in 5 years when the CDN decides to take down the outdated version of the framework.

I feel like "Menu" isn't really an option neither, as it seems like an unfinished option,

afaik In bulma, you're supposed to be able to mix and match the components, so you can just shove a class=content / icons / responsive images etc into your menu if you want something that's not just a navigation link. Maybe you can even put tiles in there.

I found that the menu also works a lot better once you've added some server side to add the is-active and some JS to it to make elements hide/show etc. Bulma components often look pretty limited because they usually don't have the JS in them to spice them up.

I didn't really love menu when I first saw it, but I've got a bunch of stuff in bulma already, and I didn't feel like porting... It turned out that the menu is pretty good, and once you've implemented it you're never going to think this hard about the menu again. Personally I really only thought about it while implementing it, and it very quickly became "just a menu i can add more stuff to".