Hi @Mubin17 Thank you for looking into this and welcome to the community. This is a good starting point, but we need the navigation section to appear like it does here:

We would like to show the Examples links, as opposed to the API links ( that reference the matplotlib.* library ). To understand this better, click on pyplot animation from the navigation section and then see what the navigation section continues to display. It should be the same as the above screenshot.

Whereas, if you were to click on some other example from the navigation section like Decay, it will load all the matplotlib api links in the navigation section, as opposed to retaining the examples links like it does in the pyplot animation as shown in your screenshot.

This is what we want to fix.

Thank you @codingtosh for reviewing my PR. I believe that the problem lies with the examples mentioned/referenced in the animation_api.rst file. They seem to be causing the website to break, while the examples not referenced their work just fine.

Here is a list of examples referenced in the animation_api.rst:

• Decay
• The Bayes update
• The double pendulum problem
• Animated histogram
• Rain simulation
• Animated 3D random walk
• Animated line plot
• Oscilloscope
• MATPLOTLIB UNCHAINED
• Animated image using a precomputed list of images
• Frame grabbing

And here is the list of examples not referenced in animation_api.rst

• pyplot animation
• Multiple axes animation
• pasuing and resuming an animation
• animated scatter saved as gif

Based on this observation, it appears that the examples mentioned in animation_api.rst are the root cause of the problem.

The solution that I am proposing involves removing the examples from the animation_api.rst file entirely. By doing so, we can effectively break the linkage between the Example links and API links, which should resolve the issue with the side navigation.

Additionally, this solution has the advantage of providing cleaner side navigation for the API references, as shown in the following example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/48038715/239146952-a8db6b1d-605a-4bbc-9ae0-f52ef564da45.png

If there's a specific need to reference Example links in animation_api.rst, we can brainstorm some alternative approaches to achieve that while keeping the navigation section intact. I'm open to discussion.

Hello @Mubin17 - thanks for looking into this!

I think my preference would be to remove the toctree but keep simple links to the examples. I'll show what I mean below:

Thanks for the help @melissawm. I've squashed all the commits into one for the sake of clean-up. Let me know if there are any additional changes you would like me to address. Thanks again!

Thanks for narrowing it down @Mubin17 , that was a sharp observation. Nicely done! For my reference, could you show me the screenshot of how the navigation section looks like when you reproduce the steps mentioned in #25908 after these changes?

There should have been an automatic check of the doc build and a link that allows us to view how the docs look with this change. I don’t know why that didn’t happen, but I’ll try closing and re-opening to see if that triggers it…

Maybe because it's on main branch? Even tests aren't running.

@QuLogic I usually create a new branch for my pull requests, but it seems like I forgot to do it this time. My bad! Would creating a new PR on a separate branch help?

It may help; I don't see anything obvious that would have been stopping it though.

I have made a new PR [#25977] on a separate branch. I hope it helps

OK, we'll see there.

Even tests aren't running.

We deliberately skip tests if all the changes are under doc, so that’s expected. E.g. #25707.