Worldbuilding is fun, and tools like World Anvil make organizing your work a breeze. But still, when you have a big world, navigating your own content can be a little bit difficult! World Anvil has many tools to organize your worldbuilding, and you might not be aware of all of them —so let’s take a look!
The tables of many contents
This is a table of contents for a category on the World Anvil Codex!
It’s not a magic item, it’s organization! World Anvil has three types of tables of contents (or TOC) that you can add anywhere on your world for quick navigation. On one hand, there’s the world TOC, which you can already see on the homepage of your world —just type the code [toc] in any article to add it there! As simple as that! On the other hand, you can add a similar TOC but for a single category. Just go to the category edit page and copy the category table of contents widget. Paste in anywhere and boom, magic! It’s a great way to automatically display related articles!
A recent addition to the TOC family is the article TOC tag. Type the code [articletoc] anywhere in an article and watch the magic happen. The tag will scan the article for its headers and display them in a linked list! This is so useful for long articles! Just keep in mind that this one doesn’t like the other two TOCs very much, so it might not work if you use both kinds of TOC in the same article.
Check out the Codex guide on the different tables of contents for more details!
Organize your worldbuilding with the navigation sidebar!
Navigation sidebar in Cathedris, by Stormbril
In fact, you don’t need to do anything —the sidebar is already there! Go view your world in presentation mode and look for the list icon on the left edge of your screen. Clicking it will make the navigation sidebar appear, which has the world table of contents, maps, and timelines. Automatic organization? What else could you ask for? Customization, that’s what!
If you’re a Master of the Guild (or above ranks), you can customize its contents! Go to the Display section of your world configuration and scroll down to the world navigation sidebar custom content section. Whatever you write in there (with full BBCode support) will appear on top of the navigation sidebar.
Categories vs child articles
You probably know both of these features, but sometimes it might be difficult to know which one to use. The system is designed for categories to be used as big containers of information, while child articles only contain details that are not very important.
A good example to explain the difference is a town: its citizens and its different buildings should go under different categories. But what about details such as the tavern’s menu? That’s ideal for a child article under the tavern article!
Using tags to organize your worldbuilding
Because categories and child articles are not enough, we also have tags! Tags are a parallel organization method to categories, which means that you can use both on the same article! Not only that, but a single article can have multiple tags too. Adding a tag is extremely simple: just edit the article and look for the tags section in the right sidebar. Yes, it’s as simple as that!
When you have multiple tagged articles, you can use the [tagged] BBCode to display a list of all articles with that tag! This has many useful uses, check out this blog post for great ideas from our community!
![Oneriwien is using the [tagged] tag to list all of his player's secrets](https://i0.wp.com/blog.worldanvil.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/oneriwien.png?resize=529%2C90)
Oneriwien is using tags in Ravare to automatically display all of his players’ secrets in a single (private) article!
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