Quickstart: put a menu in the sidebar

The shortest way from “the plugin is installed” to “the menu is in the sidebar and shows the page tree”. Two steps, about five minutes. Everything beyond that — ordering, short labels, collections — is in the German tutorial (German).

Prerequisites

wkacmenu is installed and enabled in the Extension Manager.
You may edit the sidebar. Which page that is stands in Admin → Configuration → sidebar; the default is sidebar in the respective namespace.
At least one namespace with a few pages in it — otherwise the menu renders correctly and shows nothing.

Step 1: open the sidebar

Open the sidebar page and choose Edit this page. In a wiki with language namespaces that is, for example, en:sidebar.

Address: /doku.php?id=en:sidebar&do=edit

Step 2: insert the menu

Write into the page:

{{wk:acmenu>ns=auto}}

and save.

ns=auto means: the menu follows the page being read. That is the right choice for a sidebar serving the whole wiki. Without a parameter — {{wk:acmenu}} — the menu behaves the same; ns=auto only states it explicitly.

The > after wk:acmenu is not decoration. Without it DokuWiki's own media syntax {{ns:file}} matches and you get a broken link instead of a menu.

Check the result

Reload any content page. The sidebar now carries a tree of namespaces and pages; clicking a namespace expands it without leaving the page.

Two pieces of evidence that this really is the plugin and not a cache:

The tree shows only what your account may read. Sign out: denied namespaces disappear.
Create a new page. It appears in the menu without the sidebar being touched.

Next step

wki18n — translated menu labels, by nesting a translation tag inside {{wk:title>…}}.
wkacmenu (German) — the package page: all parameters, ordering, collections, diagnosis.