Move some Site metadata out of .Site/site when moving templates out of core

[cshoredaniel]

As @jmooring and others have observed there are problems with .Site.Authors / .Site.Author

.Site.Author Usage?

There are a couple of previous posts on here from 2016 about this, and it doesn’t appear that the documentation has ever been updated. I found some (unpublished?) documentation inside the Github repo for Hugo by searching for “author” that shines some light on this, but it’s still not clear to me how this should be utilized. Let’s assume I’m willing to create the scaffolding of per-author profiles, and I use the authors[] array in post front matter to reference these identifiers. I am not und…

but I think the problem is deeper than that, and as I understand the internal templates are likely to be moved out of Hugo core (which make a lot of sense to me), this would be a good time to remove some metadata from the .Site variable / site function that make certain metadata assumptions for those templates that are not a good idea to have be an issue that core has to deal with.

For example:

• .Site.Author
• .Site.Authors
• .Site.Copyright
• .Site.Disqus.Shortname
• .Site.GoogleAnalytics

These could all be, I believe be more reasonably handled as .Site.Params (and as a bonus can be overridden by page params if desired by the template author, through the use of .Param "variable" instead of .Site.Params.variable.

At the time they were added I think it made sense, but especially with moving the templates out of core, I think it would be beneficial to also move the ‘data model’ discussions for this type of ‘extra’ metadata (not required for rendering the page) out of core as well.

I think my argument in

Remove .Site.Authors from embedded templates

that .Site.Authors is not really a special case except that it was never implemented, but the argument used to not simply replace .Site.Authors with .Site.Author.authors in the templates, suggests that this type of metadata add a burden to core that isn’t needed (that is having to agree on a data model for variables that Hugo supports in .Site before updating templates to use a working technique, even if like the currently broken twitter ones they don’t currently do what is expected).