How can I configure Zola to act just as the blog for my otherwise static website (exported from Wordpress)?

1

I’ve exported my site from Wordpress as a static site and moved it to the static directory. Zola gives a faithful reproduction of my website when I run:

zola build; zola serve

Of course, the legacy blog is now unmaintainable without Wordpress and that’s what I want Zola to replace. The documentation is very good, but I’m not sure where to start. My homepage is a static page and I have head.html and foot.html files in the template directory giving me consistent menus and footers across the site. So I just need an index page for the blog to live at /blog. Then I’ll start recreating each blog entry in markdown. Any pointers appreciated!

I’m on zola 0.19.2 from macOS brew.

2

Replying to my own post because an AI chatbot helped me figure it out. I don’t know if all of these steps were necessary, but this is what helped add a path to my static site where Zola can manage the blog:

  1. Edit config.toml and under [extra] add:
    blog = "/blog/[slug]"
    /blog is the path I want the blog index to be at and [slug] represents the varying titles of each potential blog post. On the filesystem though, this has to be created in content, so something like ‘mkdir content/blog’.

  2. In the templates directory, create section.html that will be used as the index page. Mine looks like this, but it’s just a functional test:

 <!DOCTYPE html>
 <html>
 <head>
     <title>{{ section.title }}</title>
 </head>
 <body>
     <h1>{{ section.title }}</h1>
     <ul>
         {% for post in section.pages %}
             <li><a href="{{ post.permalink }}">{{ post.title }}</a></li>
         {% endfor %}
     </ul>
 </body>
 </html>
  1. In the content/blog directory, create an _index.md. Mine contains:
 +++
 title = "My Blog"
 +++
 
 # Welcome to my new blog
  1. For each blog post you want, create a markdown file in the content/blog directory following the formatting guidelines.

I’m not clear why both the section.html and the _index.md are necessary. Can anyone explain that? Also, the “Welcome to my new blog” text in step 3 does not show so I obviously need to learn more about what elements of sections are and are not used to build the blog.

3

I’d recommend reading the Zola overview. Overview | Zola It walks through the difference between a section, page, and template.

At a high level, Zola splits your content from rendering templates. They go in content where a section maps to a path (i.e. content/blog would be /blog). The _index.md specifies attributes about this section type and can also have content which would be displayed at /blog

All other markdown pages inside content/blog (in this example) would become /blog/[slug] where the slug is the slugified pathname or the name in the frontmatter.

You specify for these what template to use in the _index.md with template (for section) and page_template for pages.

If you want the section’s _index.md content you can access it with {{ section.content }}

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