Help migrating from plain HTML

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2

Hi,
I understand that you have trouble understanding all the rules, Zola (and most other SSGs) are quite a beast!

Zola will preserve the hierarchy of your content folder.
So if you want to have a page at in example.com/2025/07/12/hello-world/, you’ll have to have a file at the path content/2025/07/12/hello-world.md.

Now, the problem is that each subdirectory is a Section in Zola, so each of your posts will be in a sub-sub-subsection of your index page. (Also, each folder must have an _index.html for Zola to recognize it as a section).

I wrote (just for you!) a minimal template/index.html page that hides to the visitor this Zola-internal concept of sections, by listing all pages in all sub-sub-subsections:

{% for sub in section.subsections %}
{% set sub = get_section(path=sub) %}

{% for ssub in sub.subsections %}
{% set ssub = get_section(path=ssub) %}

{% for sssub in ssub.subsections %}
{% set sssub = get_section(path=sssub) %}

{% for page in sssub.pages %}

<p>
<a href="{{ page.path }}">{{ page.date }}: {{ page.title }}</a>
</p>

{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

Documentation for Section variables

Here’s a zip with the full minimal example: https://u.ppom.me/test.zip

An alternative is to think in Zola and put all your articles at the root of content.

They’ll live at the root of the website to, but you can preserve existing links by adding “orphan pages” (pages in content/year/month/day/, but without _index.html) that just redirect to the new page location with simple html: Redirect to an external site on page load? - #3 by zolappom

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