Part 21: Complex Eleventy Tags

More devblog

Project Scope and ToDos

Static Site Generator that can build the blog and let me host it on Github Pages
I want to write posts in Markdown because I'm lazy, it's easy, and it is how I take notes now.
I don't want to spend a ton of time doing design work. I'm doing complicated designs for other projects, so I want to pull a theme I like that I can rely on someone else to keep up.
Once it gets going, I want template changes to be easy.
It should be as easy as Jekyll, so I need to be able to build it using GitHub Actions, where I can just commit a template change or Markdown file and away it goes. If I can't figure this out than fk it, just use Jekyll.
I require it to be used by a significant percent of my professional peers so I can get easy answers when something goes wrong.
I want source maps. This is a dev log site which means whatever I do with it should be easy for other developers to read.

Also the sitemap plugin looks cool. Should grab that later.
So does the reading time one.
Also this TOC plugin mby?
Use Data Deep Merge in this blog.
Decide if I want to render the CSS fancier than just a base file and do per-template splitting.

~~Can I use the template inside of dinky that already exists instead of copy/pasting it?~~

Day 21

Hmm I still want to paginate my tags pages. I originally thought that I could just add to the number of size in the YAML front matter. But of course that doesn't work, the template doesn't have knowledge of anything other than the list of tags at that point.

So we need to pass in a set of tags with the actual posts mapped per-tag. There doesn't seem to be a built in way to do this, so I need to adjust the tagList collection. I need to make it return an object where each tag is a top-level property that points to an array of posts.

Previously I had:

collection.getAll().forEach((item) => {
	(item.data.tags || []).forEach((tag) => tagSet.add(tag));

But now lets switch it around.

function filterTagList(tags) {
	return (tags || []).filter(
		(tag) => ["all", "nav", "post", "posts"].indexOf(tag) === -1
	);
}

collection.getAll().forEach((item) => {
			filterTagList(item.data.tags).forEach((tag) => {
				if (tagSet.hasOwnProperty(tag)) {
					tagSet[tag].push(item);
				} else {
					tagSet[tag] = new Set();
					tagSet[tag].push(item);
				}
			});
		});
		return tagSet;

Hmmm, not the most efficient, we're doing the same line of code twice. Let's simplify.

filterTagList(item.data.tags).forEach((tag) => {
  if (!tagSet.hasOwnProperty(tag)) {
  	tagSet[tag] = new Set();
  }
  tagSet[tag].push(item);
});

Ok, let's see if this works. Should be good, but how do I get the actual items? I'll have to change the template. Hmm, it looks like there isn't really a way to access the key in the YAML arguments. I'll have to add that too somehow?

Note the use of Set here, to keep posts unique.

Oops forgot that Set uses add not push for adding to the set.

Hmm. Better.

Now I'll have to adjust the pagination permalink it looks like to resolve this error:

Problem writing Eleventy templates: (more in DEBUG output)
> Having trouble rendering njk template ./src/tags-pages.njk

`TemplateContentRenderError` was thrown
> (./src/tags-pages.njk)
  Error: slugify: string argument expected

`Template render error` was thrown:
    Template render error: (./src/tags-pages.njk)
      Error: slugify: string argument expected

Oh, right, I can't access Sets with [0]. I don't think Eleventy anticipates Sets anyway, so I should likely take the time to convert the Sets of posts into Arrays.

Ok, easy enough, let's use the spread operator, that's what it is for right?

		Object.keys(tagSet).forEach((key) => {
			// console.log(key);        // the name of the current key.
			// console.log(myObj[key]); // the value of the current key.
			tagSet[key] = [...tagSet[key]];
		});
		console.log(
			"tagset",
			tagSet[Object.keys(tagSet)[0]][0].data.verticalTag
		);

Ok, I'm getting the right information here in the console.log statement. It would seem that this is set up properly as a collection, but something about how it is being handled into the tags-pages isn't working.

I'm going to take a look around and see how it works. There's a basic tag page post on the Eleventy.dev site, but it doesn't allow for pagination of the tag pages in the way I was hoping.

Ok. So I think that, judging from the page on Pagination Navigation, I have to pass an array, not an object. Let's change the transformation into a set into a transformation from an object to an array.

Nope, that doesn't do it. And checking the docs it makes it clear that we can indeed paginate an object.

Hmmm. So I think maybe this just isn't working the way I would have hoped. It looks like I'm not the only person to want to do this. Judging by the pagination code this is indeed the best way to do what I want to do, which seems, sort of a shame. Others have taken a similar approach as well it looks like.

I like how the vredeburg these handles it. Very solid objects that make pagination easy and page links available. I should be able to adapt it easy. Switching over the code seems like it should be easy enough. The pagination seems to have applied, but the eleventyComputed doesn't seem to be working. Oh, a good time to commit!

git commit -am "Getting tag pages working, mostly there"

Oh, I used tabs instead of spaces. That was the problem. Well, solved now! I'll add that to my editorconfig file and be good to go!

git commit -am "Getting the basics of tags pages working"

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