Why do child _index.md files override parents?

support
1

I’ve made a couple of sites with Hugo now and consider myself pretty proficient, but I’ve got a content organization issue which is flummoxing me to no end. Here’s the deal:

Let’s imagine that I have a site which sells gift bags. Every gift bag contains a list of items. Here’s what my content looks like. You can see that I’ve got two bags: chocolates, and flowers.

├── addons
│   ├── _index.md
│   ├── candles.md
│   └── soap.md
└── bags
    ├── _index.md
    ├── chocolates
    │   ├── _index.md
    │   ├── dark.md
    │   └── milk.md
    └── flowers
        ├── _index.md
        ├── dahlia.md
        └── tulips.md

The _index.md file in /bags/ contains metadata about the bags section.

---
title: Our Amazing Bags
---

Each bag’s _index.md contains information about the bag itself, e.g.:

---
title: Bag O' Chocolate
price: $15
---

and the rest of the files contain information about the items in the bag. e.g.:

---
title: Milk Chocolate
type: item
---

Now, here’s what I don’t understand: when I navigate here:

https://localhost:1313/bags/

I see the title not from bags/_index.md – but from bags/flowers/_index.md!

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What’s more, I would expect .Data.Pages in the /bags/ section to contain the bags. It doesn’t. It only contains the items. Here’s the layouts/_default/section.html file from my template:

<h1>Section: {{ .Title }}</h1>

{{ range .Data.Pages }}
  {{ .Render "single" }}
{{ end }}

I think I’m missing something fundamental about the new “everything’s a page” model in Hugo. What is it, and how would you organize this content?

2

I thought the same thing, but I think the answer (or the solution, because I don’t have an explanation) is that the index file in the sub-topics should not have the beginning underscore. So,

--chocolates
    |-- index.md

rather than

--chocolates
    |-- _index.md

That’s what worked for me.

3

I got the idea of using _index.md from here (bottom of page):

I was hoping to use the directory structure to imply the content structure, but it looks like .Data.Pages doesn’t return anything on those index.md files. I’ll look into setting up a taxonomy to take this over the line. Very much appreciate the help!

4

When I looked at your scenario, I was thinking taxonomies might be the way to go. Yeah, not sure about the underscore, but removing it helped me.

5

I’ve been fooling around with doing this your way (I have a situation similar to yours, @jmcphers) and am confused too. If I use {{ printf "%#v" . }} on the template I see the _index data there but I’m having a hard time outputting the content I’d like.

6

Note that Hugo currently only supports 1 level of sections, so there is only bags, and – while this could probably have been handled better – there is only room for 1 _index.md file per section, and I’m guessing now it is kinda random.

This will improve in the future, though.

1 Like
7

@bep, the documentation page I linked in my earlier comment clearly shows more than one _index.md file per section. Should that be updated?

8

We have an open issue about improving the docs in this area, but the docs are correct: What you see is not sections, but taxonomies (which have 2 levels).