Hugo: Use filename as title when it’s not defined in front matter

[idealhack]

Note: I'm new to Hugo, so If there's a better way about this fell free to correct me.

For now I use {{.File.TranslationBaseName}} in template cause {{.Title}} is empty string. I thought it's better to store it in the title variable, as themes out there are already using it. Also we could use file dates for date and lastmod.

I thought this is a nice feature especially when there're a lot of content files imported from another system.

For myself, I use nvALT to take markdown notes. nvALT has already handle the title and date in this way, now I want to use Hugo for building the website. But maintaining notes metadata by hand is not a good practice IMHO.

What do you think?

This was originally posted at https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/use-filename-as-title-when-its-not-defined-in-front-matter/7965

[maxandersen]

I got a patch that makes this happen, but dependent on the changes in https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/pull/3762 that in addition to deriving date from filename also fixes how metadata defaults are calculated which is needed to fix title handling. If that PR gets merged in I can easily make a PR for this issue too.

[maxandersen]

note I think its worth going a level further and try detect if content has a top level header as defined by markdown, asciidoc or orgmode and use that header if present, if not use filename.

[bep]

note I think its worth going a level further and try detect if content has a top level header as defined by markdown, asciidoc or orgmode and use that header if present,

No, that is too hacky and not worth it.

[maxandersen]

No, that is too hacky and not worth it.

too hacky? as compared to try derive from filename ?

It works pretty well in awestruct and others and it has the big plus your blog posts actually render with proper title when shown "raw" in github.

[maxandersen]

btw. made the patch before I saw your comment so you can see the idea at https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/pull/3859

[maxandersen]

note, the idea is similar to extract toc and summary that tries to parse raw and generated content to derive "metadata".

[bep]

Note that the current TOC solution is also considered "hacky and slow" in my book, and will be fixed once Blackfriday 2 is out. We're not doing any regexp magic looking for titles.

Also, I'm not a big fan of pull requests that try to do more than the issue they describe. Do one thing well.

[maxandersen]

Also, I'm not a big fan of pull requests that try to do more than the issue they describe. Do one thing well.

okey - I've updated patch to just to title based on filename/slug.

I hope this can merged in together with the date fallback which this fix is dependent on (as without it metadata fallback calculation sequences are different whether there is a frontmatter or not )

[reinier]

No, that is too hacky and not worth it.

What's hacky about it @bep? Seems like a beautiful way to get rid of an unnecessary required front matter variable. I would love to get rid of all the required front matter entirely to keep the content documents as clean and as portable as possible.

[idealhack]

Since now we have support extract the date from filename by #4494, would it be easier to do this for the title? I would like to do a PR if there is any guidance.

BTW, I like some ideas in #4341.

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[matrixik]

bump