Managing content files

Large sites with many files can become difficult to manage. Presume you have a post/ directory with blog entries that are typically ordered on the website by date from newest to oldest. Your OS shows the files in alphabetical order – not the order you wrote them in. If you want to edit the latest file, you must manually locate it.

post/
  css-weirdisms.md
  html-first.md
  my-js-journey.md
  ramblings.md
  some-news.md

Index file numbers #

To make files easier to manage, you could add an incrementing number to the start of the filename. The last file is then the last you wrote:

post/
  001_my-js-journey.md
  002_some-news.md
  003_html-first.md
  004_css-weirdisms.md
  005_ramblings.md

You can remove the numbers from slugs using the publican.config.slugReplace Map object to replace two or more digits followed by an underscore:

publican.config.js excerpt

// slug replacement - removes NN_
publican.config.slugReplace.set(/\d{2,}_/g, '');

The latest slug would then be post/rambings/index.html rather than post/005_rambings/index.html.

Organizing documentation #

The same concept can be used to order documentation, e.g.

docs/

  01_quickstart/
    01_overview.md
    02_install.md
    03_usage.md

  02_reference/
    01_configuration.md
    02_methods.md
    03_function-hooks.md

Files can be ordered by filename in navigation and directory index pages so they appear that way in menus but their slugs have the NN_ removed:

publican.config.js excerpt

// slug replacement - removes NN_
publican.config.dirPages.sortBy = 'filename';
publican.config.dirPages.sortOrder = 1;

// slug replacement - removes NN_
publican.config.slugReplace.set(/\d{2,}_/g, '');