Difficulty with page structure

support
1

Hi guys,

I have been building/maintaining a website with Hugo for ~3 years now, and I have just run into a problem that is causing the build to produce no pages.

It was working fine until I began experimenting with the ‘branch/leaf’ pages model. The basic premise of the problem is:

  1. If I name my homepage “content/_index.md” the index page is generated, but the page scoped scratch pad does not seem to work. Which is what I am using to fill meta tags in the head, such as og:image, and video, and some JSON+LD structured data nodes. However by naming the homepage this “_index.md”, all of my other pages are not generated; the folder structure exists but there are no other HTML pages anywhere!

  2. If I name my homepage “content/index.md” the index page is generated, but no a single other page is generated. The folders that contain some static content related to leaf pages exist with the image files. But not a single HTML file besides the root index.html is generated.

Below is the current folder structure:

content/
    about-us/
        index.md
    ads/
        landing-ad.md
    blog/
        index.md
        post-1/
            images/..........
            index.md
        post-2/
            images/..........
            index.md
    contact-us/
        index.md
    index.md

This is the generated file tree:

public/
    blog/
        index.md
        post-1/
            images/..........
        post-2/
            images/..........
    index.html
    404.html
    sitemal.xml
    robots.txt

Any help or explantion would be really appreciated. This is perplexing the heck out of me and becomes a bit of a show stopper for continuing to develop this site.

I am going to be removing all the branch/page bundle formatting and return to the original structure design but any help advice would really help.

Thanks and best regards,

Sam Morrison

2

Hi there,

Having content/index.md means that the home page is a leaf bundle, which then means that all other content become Page Resources. This then means that page-type resources, such as your other .md files, are accessible only as Page Resources. They are not processed into html pages (ie they have no Permalink).

I also notice that you have content/blog/index.md. Similarly, this means that content/blog/ becomes a leaf bundle, and post-x become page resources. Renaming this to content/blog/_index.md should then generate /blog/post-1/ etc.

I’m not sure what you mean here:

If you have your code in a repo somewhere, it would make it easier to see what is going on.

2 Likes
3

@pointyfar thanks for the explanation. Saved me a ton of headache.

As for the second part, I mean when I do .Page.Scratch.Add in a short code from the content and ‘.Page.Scratch.Get’ from the template in the header doesn’t seem to work on the index page unless it is name ‘index.md’. If name is _index.md then the Scratchpad always seems nil, but when I name it otherwise it works fine. This functionality works fine on my other pages when it’s named _index.md, just not on the index page.

Really perplexing me!!

Thanks and best regards,

Schmorrison

4

It’s probably a scope issue: accessing a Scratch value before it has been set, though I don’t know why it would sometimes work.

It’s difficult to really say for sure though, without seeing the actual code.

5

Hey thanks again, and for the quick reply. Unfortunately its a business site so showing the actual code is a no-go. I could produce a minimal example, but it would take more time then I think it’ll take find a fix.

So to run through again:

  1. In my content I am using a shortcode that adds an image, and adds a value to the scratch pad for the page. And some other values that are used in the head for open graph tags.
  2. In my _index.md page the scratchpad is nil when the head is rendered.
  3. In my ‘about-us/index.md’ page the scratchpad has the correct values.
  4. When I change the homepage to index.md the scratchpad is filled correctly, but the rest of the pages are not generated.

I am going to reformat my folder structure to remove any branch/leaf page types, which hopefully will fix my issue.

Is there any other way to name the homepage such that it will be accessible from the empty url website.com/?

Thanks for your help,
schmorrison

6

I’m personally out of ideas, sorry; you may want to open a new topic with the .Scratch issue (ideally with a minimal example), as others might not see the question this far down the discussion.