Sidebar behavior improvements

[radinamatic]

Summary

Overflow from #4563.

• When clicking Topic from Next Steps on contentrec page, and closing the sidebar without choosing the item, user ends up on a completely blank page. Wouldn't it be better for contentrec to remain "active" behind the sidebar, until the user actually chooses one item from it? Right now content recommendation page seems to "disappear" while the sidebar is loaded.
• When choosing an item from dropdown-like-suggestions in the search field, or from the search results page, exercise loads correctly, but the sidebar remains open on top of it, and user must click twice to close it and actually see the exercise. Not the mention that if the exercise has a qtip active for the answer input field, it will sometime load on top of the sidebar... :) Ideally, sidebar should not open at all in this case, or if not possible, at least open & close quickly and completely, since the exercise is loaded in the background.

  Branch or installer method

ka-lite-bundle_0.16-a3-0ubuntu1_all.deb on Ubuntu 15.10, but it's a general behavior issue.

[benjaoming]

Wouldn't it be better for contentrec to remain "active" behind the sidebar, until the user actually chooses one item from it? Right now content recommendation page seems to "disappear" while the sidebar is loaded.

I think the technical reason is quite simply that elements are loaded in via Backbone.js rendering, so it has to be removed at some stage. It's not optimal, but neither is a lot of this :)

Ideally, sidebar should not open at all in this case, or if not possible, at least open & close quickly and completely, since the exercise is loaded in the background.

+1, seems like a legitimate problem where the user might not know where to click to make the sidebar disappear - or rather not know the title to click in the sidebar to get to the very exercise that's already shown.