Blog Mode: Disable or modify the date prefixes `/blog/2020/08/01/title-slug`.

[jagracey]

🚀 Feature

For blog mode in Docusaurus V2, there should be a clean way to turn off the calendar date section within the URL path for each blog post, enabling more creative documentation use cases. In our own case we've built a "help center" (knowledge base) that would benefit from disabling the path prefix.

example.com/blog/2020/08/18/title-slug ==> example.com/blog/title-slug

Have you read the [Contributing Guidelines on issues]

Yes

Motivation

See help.getwisdom.io for a live example.
example.com/2020/08/18/title-slug ==> example.com/title-slug

Pitch

Docusaurus has a great blog framework with a tagging system and related tag list pages (/tags/) that in some ways make it a more powerful documentation approach to using docs with a sidebar. We are using the "blog mode" for Help Center like documentation, however each blog entry has a calendar entry time that doesn't provide benefit:

1. Aesthetics are poor in this case
2. Semantics are not relevant, given that for us, these posts should be frequently updated (evergreen).

Currently, saving a markdown file without the filename date prefix appears to just default to UTC date instead of no date within the URL path.

Candidate Interfaces:

Possible Interfaces:

1. string path_prefix: string prefix.
   • null defaulting to current date /blog/2020/08/01/title-slug
   • '' empty string produces no prefix (special case to not produce /blog//title-slug)
   • string1/string2 produces /blog/string1/string2/title-slug
2. boolean path_prefix: Config to disable URL path prefix (currently calendar date)
3. function in docusaurus.config.js that sets the string prefix for each blog article (blog) => 'level1/level2';.
4. Stop defaulting to UTC time if the file name is not prefixed with date.

[slorber]

Yes you are right we need a way to have better control of blog slugs.

I tried this:

And the URL was this: http://localhost:3000/blog/2020/08/11/heyyy. In such case we'd rather simply not adding the date to the URL at all.

Using markdown files without dates in filenames should be supported and not produce weird issues likes this.

We need a retrocompatible solution, and I'd be fine with 2 options:

• frontmatter slug
• boolean option to remove the date from the URL, and opt-out of this legacy behavior (not useful to provide custom path prefix, because there's already a routeBasePath option anyway...)

Note: when using slugs, we should not prefix the slug of the user with a date. If they wants a date, they'll add it to the slug.

In the long term we should encourage users to only use slugs and move out of this legacy url scheme

Someone wants to work on this?

[JeanMarcSaad]

I'll be working on this 🙂

[JeanMarcSaad]

Hello @slorber

So after delving into the code, turns out this is already supported.

In this block of code in docusaurus-plugin-content-blog/blogUtils.ts,
if frontmatter.id is defined, it will use it as the only slug and not append the date to the url path.

I tried:
This blog structure

and this test.md

And the url was available at http://localhost:3000/blog/test

This feature in not documented though, and no mention of id frontmatter is present in the blog docs.

Do you think I should go forward with:

• Renaming id to slug
• Updating the documentation to include this new frontmatter key

[slorber]

Yes we should:

• rename id to slug (add a warning for users using frontmatter.id)
• document slug frontmatter
• fix the date parsing logic that use current date as a default pathname prefix when filename is test.mdx: it should just lead to /blog/test unless user is using slug frontmatter

Thanks

[slorber]

Fixed by #3284