Make front-matter metadata of all pages available in jinja2

[Jc-L]

How to access to other pages' metadata to use in pure jinja2 ? Use-case is to provide summary pages listing other pages matching some specific metadata (for example recently edited pages, pages marked for review, etc.

I attempted to use:

{% for page in navigation.pages %}
- {{ page }} / {{ page.title }} / {{ page.meta }}
{% endfor %}

However, in such metadata is only available for the current page, not for all pages.

Note: such info is available in vanilla mkdocs in the pages variable usable in templates. (see pages.py). The pages is a list of Files object that contain a Pages that contains the metadata.

[fralau]

Hi @Jc-L,

Sorry for my late answer. The specific jinja2 engine used by mkdocs_macros (on the markdown page) is not the same used by mkdocs (on HTML). The template engine used for mkdocs_macros is earlier on the page production chain.

Depending on what template engine you want to use, the answers are different (but they might also differ, according to what step of the macro conversion step you are one). You would have to tell me more precisely about your use case, and what effect you want to achieve?

[Jc-L]

Hi @fralau and thank you for the answer.

I am considering moving from a Jekyll static generator to mkdocs. I am familiar with Jekyll and make a significant use of metadata. For example, all my pages have a status metadata (draft, under_review, etc.), and I have a special page that lists all the pages where status=draft so that I can work on them.

This is just an example, and I considered the macro plugin to be a way to achieve this and other similar content management. I am however only digging the features of mkdocs and may have missed something here. Your mention of two engines running at different steps (markdown page and HTML page) makes me wonder if my approach is correct.

[fralau]

Hmm... Since it seems an mkdocs question, my best recommendation is that you ask this question on mkdocs's discussions? It's very active and I am confident you will find some willing help.

[Jc-L]

Will do, Thank you for your time and support, and for the nice piece of software :)

[Jc-L]

After checking, I think the issue is not about mkdocs (no template usage, no HTML generation) but rather specific to the plugin. The issue being that navigation.pages is only partially populated for the meta information of each page. I suppose this is because the parsing is done in the same loop as the reading of the metadata info. For my use-case to work, the initial loading of metadata should be done for all pages, and only then the parsing.

To reproduce, simply create two pages with:

{% for page in navigation.pages %}
- {{ page }} / {{ page.title }} / {{ page.meta }}
{% endfor %}

The rendered content will be different

I can check and propose a MR, if you think it is worth to.

[fralau]

I see. The philosophy is to keep the code of the plugin minimal. Perhaps you should write a module that does that, instead of modifying the code of the plugin?

Or, if you want to share it with other, a pluglet? Here is an example of pluglet.

[Jc-L]

Thank you for the tips. I understand the willingness to keep things simple (I am not sure it is a bug or not) and will see how to tackle the issue accordingly to the principles you mention.