Sorting blog posts in the `content/blog` subfolder

[verlok]

My content folder has a blog subfolder, which in turn has all the blog posts as subfolders, e.g. how-to-use-this-for-that, and every blog folder contains an index.md file for the post content, plus images that are required for that blog post.

The problem I have is to be able to determine which blog post is more recent and what is older in the content/blog subfolder. I would like a solution where every folder started with the date, e.g. 2024-11-11_how-to-use-this-for-that.

How can I achieve that using eleventy v2? And with v3?

[verlok]

I was able to do so by changing what blog.11tydata.js exports in the content/blog folder

const getFolderName = (data) => {
	const path = data.page.filePathStem;
	const parts = path.split("/");
	const folderName = parts[parts.length - 2];
	return folderName;
};

module.exports = {
	tags: ["posts"],
	layout: "layouts/post.njk",
	eleventyComputed: {
		// Compute the `date` property for each post
		date: (data) => {
			const folderName = getFolderName(data);
			const datePart = folderName.split("_")[0]; // 'YYYY-MM-DD'
			const [year, month, day] = datePart.split("-").map(Number);
			return new Date(year, month - 1, day);
		},
		// Compute the `permalink` property for each post
		permalink: (data) => {
			const folderName = getFolderName(data);
			// Remove the date part from the folder name
			const slug = folderName.split("_").slice(1).join("_");
			// Construct the permalink
			return `/blog/${slug}/`;
		},
	},
};

And I used a Python script made with ChatGPT to rename all the folders using dates from the blog posts frontmatter :)

What do you think?
Could it be a good idea to implement this in the eleventy-base-blog repo?

[verlok]

I applied that to my blog, which is maintained at this GitHub repository, and deployed to this domain.

[whitwaltman]

I'm not the maintainer, but imho, this isn't necessarily default behavior that someone might want. Depending on the editor you're using, you could simply sort files by their creation date to get an idea of what posts are newest. This might be better suited to something like 11ty.recipes, which houses a bunch of different individual features that someone can choose from to customize their eleventy build.

I like your idea, though, and I implemented a somewhat similar approach in my directory data folder for my blog posts, albeit with a different format and end result.