automatically have a list of sections

[Poolitzer]

Hi.

I would like to generate a list of the links I put in a specific sections (music of the week) in my blogpost.

I am not that deep in zola/tabi, but am able to code. I would like to know how someone with a bit experience would approach this. Probably with a short code, or is there some build in way?

[welpo]

Hey @Poolitzer!

What do you mean by "list of links"? It's not clear to me what's the structure of the data you have now, and what the end result would look like

[Poolitzer]

Hey. Currently no structure. I want to have a link in my weekly blog post series, just as a normal link in the text. But I would like to have an automated generated site where all the links are just as a list.

So I could imagine putting a short code instead of a link with the link as a variable. And it a) generates the link in the blog post and b) adds the link to the second automated site. If that makes sense.

[Poolitzer]

I implemented it for myself. I originally thought it would be possible to load this out of pages, which is not how zola works. So I did it the way zola intends.

Just in case anyone ever stumbles upon this and wants to implement it for themselves:
My goal was to just have a shortcode call without params in my blog post series, so I can easily copy paste it into my blog series template, and to not have to write out stuff in two places.

So I wrote a music_links.toml

[links]
10 = ["And I want to start to share music I listen to in this section. This week goes to {title} from {artist}, {link}. I got so much an earworm from it that I learned the accords on the guitar, the rhythm is kinda tricky for me.", "YouTube music link", "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=BlnVP2_dIb4", "Feed the Machine", "PoorMansPosion"]
11 = ["I had a short discussion with my room mate about some electro house music, I did have <em>Around the world</em> by {artist} running in the background. He recommended {link} which I can't recall hearing before, it is such a great track though. It has a spoken intro where Giorgio Moroder says the infamous line \"my name is Giovanni Giorgio but everybody calls me Giorgio\".", "Giorgio by Moroder", "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFZM6jDTWd4", "Giorgio by Moroder", "Daft Punk"]

Since my series is in the folder structure content/blog/weekly/index_starting_with_0 I can use this index from page.components[2] in the shortcode, so the shortcode works like this. The if is to check if I already wrote out the music entry for this week. Otherwise it gives an error here that the index is out of bounds, which stops the website from loading.

{% set data = load_data(path="content/blog/music_links.toml") %}
{% if page.components[2] in data.links %}
  {% set link = '<a href="' ~ data["links"][page.components[2]][2] ~ '">' ~ data["links"][page.components[2]][1] ~ '</a>' | safe %}
  <p>
    {{data["links"][page.components[2]][0] | replace(from="{link}", to=link) | replace(from="{title}", to=data["links"][page.components[2]][3]) | replace(from="{artist}", to=data["links"][page.components[2]][4]) | safe}}
  </p>
{% else %}
<p>
Do the music sharing!
</p>
{% endif %}

I didn't find a proper way to use format strings like I would in python/C but this works fine.

The extra interpret/song name are now used in a different short code which allows me to do a blog post where all music links are aggregated now:

{% set data = load_data(path="content/blog/music_links.toml") %}
<ul>
{% for blog_id,link_array in data.links -%}
<li><a href="{{ link_array[2] }}">{{ link_array[3] }} by {{ link_array[4] }}</a>.</li>

{%- endfor %}
</ul>

The only thing I am a little bit annoyed with now is that its in chronological order, so new links are added to the bottom of the list. I would have preferred it reversed but I also like this very short code and I dont see a neat way to reverse this.

And 5 unnamed params is my limit where I would switch from an array to a dictionary, so its just on the edge for me.