How can I control the order of pages from within a pelican article category?

Question

I am using pelican jinja2 templates in order to generate a navigation menu based on the category and I need a way to control the order of the pages, or at least a trick to allow me to choose the first page to be listed.

{% for a in articles %}
     {% if a.category == category %}
         <li><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ a.slug }}">{{ a.title }}
     {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

How can a make one specific article page to be the first. Their sourse is in markdown format.

Answer 1

Pelican 3.5 will introduce built-in support for article and page ordering. You can define in your pelicanconf.py by which metadata attribute articles and pages should be sorted. The two variables are:

ARTICLE_ORDER_BY = 'attribute'
PAGE_ORDER_BY = 'attribute'

For this to work correctly, you must ensure that:

• every page / article defines the specified attribute, otherwise you will get a compiler error saying the page / article class doesn't have this attribute
• your attribute always uses the same number of character; so the values 1, 10 and 100 won't produce a correct order, but 001, 010 and 100 will do

With that infrastructure in place, outputting articles in the correct order should work for your code without modifications.

Answer 2

To workaround the problem, you can disable categories and pages from being displayed automatically and set the menuitems manually in the configuration:

DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU = False
DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU = False

MENUITEMS = (
    ('Home', '/'),
    ('Archives', '/archives.html'),
    ('Tags', '/tags.html'),
    ('Category1', 'category/category1.html'),
    ('Category2', 'category/category2.html'),
)