left side navigation relies on toctree and fails

[aaronmarkham]

Much of the content of the site is being hosted on other sites like the toolkit sites. When this happens there's no file locally for Sphinx to link up, but it still adds an entry to the navigation and makes it look like there are sub items when there are not.

The navigation should have some level of control/customization that doesn't also break Sphinx when you try to work around it.

Right now you get both Sphinx errors and a broken UX.

I tried setting maxdepth to 0 to stop the nav from including a carrot when there's nothing to show, but this does nothing to the nav. It seems like the theme needs updating to prevent this problem.

You also have the issue that only local items will appear in the navigation. This means that if you have 3 articles, but two of them are off-deck, then only one appears. This is only a problem because none of the articles should show up in the nav. But when you still get some, it is very confusing what is happening.

[aaronmarkham]