How to have text, not list of posts, on the home page

Support
1

I can’t find a way to have the home page be just a regular page. It looks like the homepage is generated from index.html, which lists all posts on the site.

I don’t want to have a list of posts anywhere. I’d like my homepage to be a manually-written markdown page.

I could edit index.html and put my homepage content there, but then I’d be using plain old HTML, and I’d prefer to use markdown.

Am I missing something? I expect content/index.md to be visible as body of the home page (/ url), but it’s not.

2

It’s content/_index.md with an _ as the index is a section.

3

All depends on the theme you’re using. Which one do you use ?

4

I’m trying to migrate my existing site to Zola, so I’m also trying to create my own theme that reproduces what I had before.

Existing themes all have a list of posts on their homepage, which as I’ve mentioned, is not appropriate for my content.

5

I’ve tried _index.md as well, but I don’t know how to make it show in the homepage body. Just creating that file is not enough.

6

Ok so if you are creating your own theme, you have to understand the basic mechanisms of the theme engine. You have several options here :

  • sections can have their content too, you can just use the section object as if it was a page
  • you can do a redirection of the main section page to a page of your choice (landing page)

If you need a concrete example, I can write one for you.

1 Like
7

You can use {{ section.content | safe}} in index.html if you have content to show: https://github.com/Keats/tera/blob/master/docs/templates/index.html#L56

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8

I ran into the same issue. I was about to get what I want by…

  1. Making the content page into a section naming it content/_index.md.

  2. In the template my _index.md is extending (which is the same page.html all content htmls of mine use), I added this snippet before accessing any page properties:

    {% if page is undefined %}
    {% set page = section %}
    {% endif %}

With that my section works as if it were a page, and I got my landing page to work that way.

9

I wanted to add that I’ve just started with Zola and after quite a while skimming the docs and then reading them more carefully I was still quite confused how to get markdown content on to the home page with the default set up. I have little experience with static site generators but I’ve found that aspect confusing. It seems very titled towards sections & pages without mention of how to get markdown content on to the first page that you see.

I’m looking to write an educational overview on a subject and it seemed most reasonable to start with content on the homepage and move from there as it gets more complex. This might not be the usual approach.

1 Like