Page indexes

[KyleAMathews]

Frequently when creating a site you'll want to reference pages elsewhere e.g. on index pages or menu sections.

To simplify this, it'd be nice if you could create ad-hoc page indexes something like:

const blogIndex = createIndex('/blog/*.md', {sort: (page) => page.meta.date})

// Now on an index page.
latestBlogPosts = blogIndex({first: 10})

// Render links...

[MoOx]

I handled this in statinamic by creating a collection.json in the webpack loader that consume md.

I also provide a simple helper to play with the collection.

[KyleAMathews]

The page index json could be written out to file as a custom module. The createIndex call could be rewritten by a babel plugin perhaps to be a require call to the custom module e.g. createIndex() becomes require('indices/a12'). If this sounds crazy and you're curious I'll clarify :)

[andreypopp]

You might be interested in Query API for sitegen which does similar thing: https://sitegen.github.io/api

It doesn't implement chunked indices yet though so all metadata is always in the main chunk (which can be an overhead for super large sites > 1000 pages or something).

[KyleAMathews]

👍 yeah, that's pretty much what I'm thinking for v1 of this. v2 where I'm writing out custom modules w/ metadata could be a later optimization.

[andreypopp]

Also note that passing a function for sorting is not a great API for that purpose, I think, cause that function should be evaluated during build at webpack context (so it can sort and then chunk results).

The API should be static enough, for example using query string:

let index = createIndex('./posts/*.md?sort-by=published_date&chunk-by=50')

[KyleAMathews]

Not 100% sure now this is needed. It's been simple enough to either filter/sort pages or to put index information in config files. Closing for now but if someone has strong thoughts on this, we can reopen it in the future.

[MoOx]

For people which are interested, statinamic will handle that and more by adding a way to generate pages based on some metadata filters (eg: pages per categories, year, tags etc)

MoOx/phenomic#15

[KyleAMathews]

@MoOx a utility module for pagination (filter then sort then paginate) would be a nice project that could be shared across projects. It'd definitely be nice for Gatsby sites. I closed this issue as it's not something that'll be handled natively in core. Instead components will declare themselves as multi-page components as described in #33 (comment) and handle pagination there.