I've marked this as release critical for 2.2.5. With this change we will be able to show up-to-date release info even on the 2.2.5 docs in a nice way. Sinceversions.html will be adapted during the follow-up PRs, it might not look great in the current inline position - or at least I don't want to have to care about that. So let's bring the future version container back to 2.2.5.

2.2.5 docs will stay relevant for a while because they are the last Python 2 compatible release; and I want to be able to display nice version info there.

Build documentation:
https://circleci.com/gh/matplotlib/matplotlib/29485/artifacts/0//home/circleci/project/doc/build/html/index.html

Reused the old javascript code as discussed in the call to keep maximum browser support.

Build documentation:
https://circleci.com/gh/matplotlib/matplotlib/29668/artifacts/0//home/circleci/project/doc/build/html/index.html

I'd rather not move the donation link above the version infos. IMHO, the version info is more important and also what people are looking for much more often.
I'm not saying the donation link is not important. Announcing this prominently is desirable. However, I suspect that the amount of donations is tiny no matter where it is on the page (we probably have numbers on how much is donated to Matplotlib?).

Even including this change, the link won't be much more down compared tohttps://matplotlib.org/2.2.4/ because the search field moved into the nav bar. Additionally, it will move up again further with the planned change in#16253. Anyway, it should be visible without scrolling for all decent screen sizes.

we probably have numbers on how much is donated to Matplotlib?
Yeah,@tacaswell and Numfocus have that info. And yeah it's not much so I'm not gonna put up a fight over it.

Owee, I'm MrMeeseeks, Look at me.

There seem to be a conflict, please backport manually. Here are approximate instructions:

1. Checkout backport branch and update it.

$ git checkout v2.2.x$ git pull

2. Cherry pick the first parent branch of the this PR on top of the older branch:

$ git cherry-pick -m1 5cb84e070bcb4ebc5ddd5b1c8e5e8a1eccec5863

3. You will likely have some merge/cherry-pick conflict here, fix them and commit:

$ git commit -am 'Backport PR #16255: Move version info to sidebar'

4. Push to a named branch :

git push YOURFORK v2.2.x:auto-backport-of-pr-16255-on-v2.2.x

5. Create a PR against branch v2.2.x, I would have named this PR:

"Backport PR#16255 on branch v2.2.x"

And apply the correct labels and milestones.

Congratulation you did some good work ! Hopefully your backport PR will be tested by the continuous integration and merged soon!

If these instruction are inaccurate, feel free tosuggest an improvement.