Allow Hugo to parse "plain" Markdown

[lucperkins]

I work on a lot of OSS documentation projects, and I strive to use Hugo in all of them (I can point to 20+ projects that I've used Hugo for). One of the downsides of Hugo is this: many people want to be able to use a directory full of "bare" Markdown in conjunction with Hugo, but they can't, which means that they need to provide some kind of "bridging" solution that converts that Markdown into something consumable by Hugo.

By "bare" Markdown I mean Markdown with:

1. No page metadata specifying the title, params, tags, etc.
2. Links to /docs/foo.md rather than /docs/foo (because the links are to Markdown pages, not rendered HTML pages).

So what usually happens is that people create some kind of build pipeline using tools like Gulp.js that adds page metadata, converts links, etc. It would be fantastic if Hugo provided you the option to:

1. Derive the document title from, say, the first <h1> or maybe the first header.
2. Automatically convert /foo.md links to /foo (or even make the .md configurable).

Imagine the ability to do this (just spitballing here):

hugo server --convertLinks "md" --inferTitle --source my-github-repo

As with issue #6095, I'd be happy to take on this work if others think it's a good idea. I'm not sure how useful this would be to others. I do know that it would be immensely useful to me and I can think of many projects that would benefit.

[onedrawingperday]

Basically this issue is about allowing markdown content without front matter and I also think that this would be a very useful feature in Hugo.

[lucperkins]

@onedrawingperday Yes, that's precisely it. I work on many documentation projects in which the front matter contains nothing but a title, which could be inferred according to a hierarchy like this:

1. Front matter
2. If not in front matter, use first header
3. If no headers, use filename

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. The resources of the Hugo team are limited, and so we are asking for your help.
If this is a bug and you can still reproduce this error on the master branch, please reply with all of the information you have about it in order to keep the issue open.
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[DewofyourYouth]

sounds doable. i'll take a look at it.

[bep]

@DewofyourYouth I think we need to talk a little about the "what" here first.

This issue is a little bit old. From when @lucperkins created it I think the core of the problem is already solved, see https://github.com/bep/portable-hugo-links

What's left in the above is the document title.

Derive the document title from, say, the first <h1> or maybe the first header.

Which would mean a repeated value, not really useful. Most Markdown docs start at h2.

[lucperkins]

@bep In my experience, most people use an h1 at the very top of the document to specify the title when they’re not specifying it via metadata.

[DewofyourYouth]

Yeah, I was going to ask that the issue seemed to be mostly solved.
OK, so if I understand correctly, what we might want to do is just to check for the first h1 on docs without frontmatter - and if there is one to use it as the title?

[lucperkins]

@DewofyourYouth I’m more proposing a render hook that would enable you to potentially determine the title via something that isn’t front matter. So you could have logic like “if the title is set via front matter use that, otherwise use the first h1 in .Content, otherwise use a titleized version of the filename.”

[DewofyourYouth]

OK. Sounds like a plan. @bep does that work?
@lucperkins could you share an example of one of these gulpfiles you were talking about so I can get a sense of what kind of edge cases I should be thinking of? (If not I'll just use my imagination or find one.)

[lucperkins]

@DewofyourYouth Sadly no, as I’ve put in a bajillion hours to successfully eliminate them 😀 But I think you fully grasp the problem already. Those scripts really only did two things, changing /foo.md to /foo and inserting front matter. The first has been solved via render hooks, and allowing for zero front matter would solve the second one.

So yeah, earlier in this thread I was envisioning something more hardcoded (“infer title via first header”) but later in the thread I realized that render hooks could enable you to infer the title however you like. And maybe even allow you to infer other front matter items (date, weight, etc) as well.

[bep]

OK. Sounds like a plan. @bep does that work?

We currently parse the metadata early and the content lazily and only if it's used. I'm not giving up on that for this feature, so we need to think about it. I have my plate filled with other stuff, so this needs to wait.

[ghost]

I would absoluteley appreciate this feature!

[edrex]

I would like to use hugo for rendering my plain markdown notes/journals. My current experience is that plain markdown pages are rendered (at least with my config) but don't show up in lists.

We currently parse the metadata early and the content lazily and only if it's used.

Makes sense. How about just falling back to a title-cased version of the filename (eg "the-story-of-pie" => "The Story of Pie"), for the moment? @bep

I'd be happy to have a go at impl if so.

hi @lucperkins :)

[edrex]

don't show up in lists

Actually, they do, it's just that they

a. have no title so the <a doesn't render
b. are out of order since they don't have a date

I was able to get entries without a title to show by replacing {{ .Title }} with {{ .Title | default .File.BaseFileName }} in my list.html.

The other barrier to this being useful is lack of date ordering. Not sure if this can be worked around in templates.

[onedrawingperday]

Apparently it is possible to make Hugo parse Markdown without front matter by using Front Matter Cascade

See this forum post and the one below for the details:
https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/what-is-required-to-make-markdown-get-picked-up/24191/8

cc: @bep