How to omit specific heading from TOC?

1

I have a separate heading at end of my post for Further reading, which I don’t want to show up in the TOC.

The heading is normally defined with markdown as level 4 heading

#### Further reading

content...

Presently, the heading shows up in my TOC normally like other headings. I don’t expect that behaviour since my TOC template code is supposed to show only 2 levels of headings. (I might be wrong with this part)

In LaTeX, I can omit a specific heading from TOC by using aesterix (eg \section*{Further reading})

Is something similar possible with Zola?

TOC template code from page.html 
{% if page.toc %}
<a onclick="toggle('toc-custom')">Toggle table of contents</a>
<div id="toc-custom" style="display:none">
<h3>Contents</h3>
<ul>
{% for h1 in page.toc %}
    <li>
        <a href="{{ h1.permalink | safe }}">{{ h1.title }}</a>
        {% if h1.children %}
            <ul>
                {% for h2 in h1.children %}
                    <li>
                        <a href="{{ h2.permalink | safe }}">{{ h2.title }}</a>
                    </li>
                {% endfor %}
            </ul>
        {% endif %}
    </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
</div>
<hr>
{% endif %}
2

Playing around, I discover that using HTML doesn’t show up the heading in TOC.

<h4>Further reading</h4>

Not sure if this is the way Zola intends this to be achieved though.

3

It’s not about their actual HTML tag, but rather their level. So you can’t just add more # to hide a heading. If your Further Reading section were nested within two levels, then it would be hidden.

Regarding your actual question, yes, it’s possible, with a bit of work.

For my theme, I wrote a table of contents macro that checks for an “ignore pattern”. See the code here.

Basically, before rendering a heading, it checks if it matches a Regex set at the page level, on the post’s front matter.

For your specific use case, you’d set the ignore pattern like:

+++
title = "Your Post's Title"
date = 2023-10-02

[extra]
toc_ignore_pattern = "^(Further reading)"
+++

Hope that helps!