How can one do a series of posts with part 1, part 2, part 3, etc.?

I’m thinking basically a BIG post but split up over a few pages…

/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island/
/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island/2/
/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island/3/

Is there a way to do this that is elegant? I figure the inelegant way to do this is to make a post /content/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island.md and then for the other parts either make the directory structure /content/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island/2.md or just make the post /content/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island-part2.md with a slug of /analysis-of-monkey-island/2/ . Are either way viable? is there a better way?

You could make “Analysis of monkey island” and then just label your .md files as 1.md, 2.md, or 3.md.

Or this is where taxonomies could help, but it won’t give you the exact url structure above until taxonomy permalinks are configurable:

Title: Analysis of Monkey Island Part 1
series: ["Monkey Island"]

Then you’d have something to the effect of:

/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island-part-1
/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island-part-2
/blog/analysis-of-monkey-island-part-3

But then also…

/series/monkey-island

That lists all three of them on that taxonomy page. This would give you the option to write more stories maybe a few months from now that will automatically be added to the series taxonomy. You can also reference within your single.html on that particular blog post that says “This is part X of series X” and link back to the taxonomy page.

As far as /2/, /3/, I wouldn’t recommend that as a URL structure for anything other than pagination, and that’s large a matter of convention (e.g. /page/1). Human readable URLs is an SEO best practice.

A series is often different than a section like “blog” since typically blogs are ordered according to date, BUT that doesn’t mean you can’t treat each section of the site as its own series (or even as chapters of a book, for that matter). This is when content modeling gets tough: what’s a section vs what’s a channel vs what’s a management-only attribute vs what’s in it just for SEO vs what’s a reflection of governance, yada, yada, yada…

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Thanks!

No problem. Note that series as a taxonomy is your best bet since you can then write multiple series in the future too and just keep them all as chronological posts. Just a thought…

yea, i was thinking about my kid writing some books on his blog and how to visualize that… and seems like doing it in a similar way as you described would be good.

You know, I feel like we need a REALLY good and deep investigation into taxonomies and multi-varied examples into what can be done with them and how to do it. People are stuck in a simple category/tag mindset but as you’ve said before, they are really powerful, but no one has the mental model to use that power.

@gaetawoo I agree on the following:

  1. The docs around taxonomies can be made clearer (and more concise; I’m too long winded)
  2. Taxonomies, as a feature, could (not my decision) become even more powerful with an added feature set.

A deep exploration of taxonomy development is a (very small) facet of content strategy, which is its own line of work. I love it, but I think that’s better explained by community blog posts (for both Hugo and C-strat) and not as part of the Hugo docs, since that would be impossible to maintain for a project like that is aimed at developers, the FOSS community, etc…

Hugo docs should try, when possible, to explain how to leverage the tool in a fun/efficient/powerful way to make really fast websites with almost no product lock-in and among a community of really great/smart/generous people. Making a good website in terms of both modeling and content is slightly out of scope;)

yea i’m not saying it should be part of the docs, just as another resource site… would be nice fo sho, is all i’m sayin

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