Setting up permalinks for posts and other categories of content

[sciwonder]

I don't know if this is a feature currently (I searched but couldn't find any info on it), but is there a way to set up preferences for permalinks to things like blog posts in _metadata.yml in the posts folder? In my previous blog setup (using Hugo and Wowchemy), I had the following in config.yaml, for example:

permalinks:
  event: '/talk/:slug/'
  authors: '/author/:slug/'
  tags: '/tag/:slug/'
  categories: '/category/:slug/'
  publication_types: '/publication-type/:slug/'
  post: '/post/:year/:month/:day/:slug'

For blog posts, this translated to a hyperlink that started off with the year, followed by month, followed by day, and then the post's slug, which was specified within the post with slug: in the YAML header (e.g., //blog-name.netlify.app/post/2022/07/16/slug-for-blog-post/). Others might prefer a smaller hyperlink (e.g., '/post/:year/:slug') or even just the slug. I think setting this up in _metadata.yml might provide greater consistency. (Apologies if this feature already exists and I've just missed it in the documentation!)

[jjallaire]

No, currently links are always mapped to the physical location of content in the site (we'll consider doing slug customization in a future release but it's not an entirely trivial feature as we need to make sure that link resolution and navigation are all aware of the custom slugs)

[sciwonder]

Thank-you for the prompt reply!! I forgot to add that another reason it might be useful is because of Google's recommendations for URL structure. I currently have my content organised in folders in the following format (YYYY-MM-DD_some-folder-title), which works well for file organisation (I know what's what at a glance), but isn't necessarily ideal when translated to a URL (e.g., //site-name/posts/YYYY-MM-DD_some-folder-title/), at least if Google's recommendations are anything to go by. In a certain sense though, I think it's preferable insofar as it might prompt users to think more carefully about how they organise their content in the first place.

[mcanouil]

I believe redirects/aliases solves this, see https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-navigation.html#redirects.
(closing this as completed for now)

[danieltomasz]

@mcanouil what if I want to use aliases in first place? I mean I want the aliases to be visible on my page, not my real names? Or maybe I dont know how to set them, I just testing them locally

[mcanouil]

I don't believe you can.
Quarto makes the links based on your project directory structure.

@dragonstyle do you confirm? ¹

Footnotes

1. I believe in the future with the work to map the whole project, aliases could be use as the default links. ↩

[dragonstyle]

You can't use aliases as the links now, and since a page might have more than one alias, it will be pretty advanced conceptually to expose selecting an alias to use when generating links to a page. I think for this use case we're probably better off trying to more directly support page slugs which for this are likely to be a simple solution (when we get it supported!).

[danieltomasz]

Hugo has a frontmatter variable

slug: "slug-url-adjusted"

And this solution would work for me.
What would be estimated release? Quarto 1.5 -1.6? What is a bottleneck here?

[dragonstyle]

Yeah I would say likely 1.5-1.6. The only bottleneck is really time and resources - it is probably a slightly fiddly and error prone change as we have to make sure any code which resolves a link to a document uses the proper slug.

[danieltomasz]

thank you for quick reply, I understand the complexity related to such mapping;

I think that Hugo also has similar limitation, but it has one level of complexity less, as the the post could be created from single markdown file not needing folder and index.qmd;

With the current structure quarto is much more suitable for showcasing whole projects and publication (as this is really well mapping to folder), not so much for daily blogging with many files/posts where the folder structure I use for writing might be not the best for the online presentation (as my personal preference);

[mcanouil]

Now tracked in:

• Add support for slug #6422