Externalising front matter

I am using the amazing DocDock theme for a site and I can see how I can give each page it’s own front matter (as you can with any theme of course)… but specifically with DocDock the title is used to make the page show up in site navigation area.

+++
title = "Cheatsheet: Curl"
head ="<label>Curl</label>"
+++

However, I would like to know if I can externalise this front matter into a some other config file, because as I edit the files in VS Code, these lines are not markdown and show distracting output… similarly I process some of these files with grip, which also doesn’t know how to interpret front matter.

Rob
:slight_smile:

You could outsource additional data and use data templates. But if I understand correctly, you want to eliminate Frontmatter completely because VS Code is not recognizing it correctly? Have a look at the VS Code Plugins instead.

Btw. I’m not using VS Code, so I haven’t tried them

1 Like

Thanks for the advice @kascme. I checked out those Hugo plugins, but none of them help me in my case. But that’s fine - I have worked out a solution in a different way.

Due to the way I am working, I don’t want those files to live in the DocDock application so I created a script that copies my md files from their original locations (several disparate directories) into the directory structures of the Hugo DocDock application. I extended the script to add the front matter to each md file as it gets copied in, i.e. I rolled my own solution for externalising the front matter.

Perhaps not the most elegant solution and may prove to be unwieldy if the number of files goes above 100, but seems ok for now.

Rob
:slight_smile: