Support for pagination and categories/tags

[gesposito]

I haven't dig much about it, does gatsby have built in support for pagination and categories/tags?
i.e.
http://blog.ghost.org/page/2/
http://blog.ghost.org/tag/writing/

That would sum up in two special routes that accept a wildcard * after the main path.
/page/*/
/tag/*/

While playing with gatsy I also found beneficial to leave the main route "themable", I mean
/page/_template.jsx
/tag/_template.jsx
As it would work for WordPress (use the custom page if found, or pick the default one).

Another different scenario is the 404 page that should be supported by React Router.

[KyleAMathews]

Not yet. This would be very useful. I think how it should work is that index files should be use the Router's * routes. So /page/2 would be handled by /page/index.jsx. It would be passed a prop with a 2 so it would know what to do.

I think ideally there would be a gatsby-pagination npm module that people could install that for the most part would "just work". I think for that to happen, Gatsby needs some sort of middleware concept where route components could get wrapped by plugins. Also we need a better way of representing page data, perhaps #15 so it'd be very easy for a pagination plugin or a tag module to wrap index files, look for url arguments and do logic like "filter out all markdown files matching path /blog/* that have the category of writing".

Thoughts?

[gesposito]

On the writing side (.md) page data looks fine to me, I'd leave it as it is for compatibility and porting (i.e. Jekyll).
Tags are as easy as adding a row into the .md header, then the index will do the rest (filtering). If it is for performance gains, then they could be stored/indexed in a more efficient manner (at compile/static generation time).

Pages are a little tricky, and needed (out of the box?), look at the gatsby-starter-documentation and its nested pages structure that is also suitable for organizing topics/layouts in a blog/site, all of those "sub trees" should have their own pagination too.

[KyleAMathews]

Right, pagination is tricky and it'd be nice to put that logic in its own plugin. Here's an idea for how plugins could be structured.

paginationPlugin: [{
  blog: {
    pathPattern: /^\/blog/.*/,
    outputPathPattern: "/blog/{pageIndex}/"
    process: (pages) => { // function is called with all that pages that matches the `pathPattern`
      // Order pages then return object like { 1: [// pages], 2: [// pages], 3: [// pages] }
  },
  docs: { // Do something similar here for docs }}
]

Gatsby would calculate ahead of time the pagination. Then for each possible output page (e.g. /blog/4/) Gatsby would generate a page using a template that you'd also configure with the plugin.

[KyleAMathews]

We need to start brainstorming for a proper plugin API.

[KyleAMathews]

So one thought here is to let pages use the RoutePattern from React-Router. So a blog index at /blog/index.js could declare its path as /blog/:page. It would then be called whenever some visits /blog/1/, /blog/2/ etc.

[KyleAMathews]

Category/tag pages could do something similar e.g. /tags/:tag.

[luckypoem]

hi.
@KyleAMathews
now the pagination is still not supported?
http://surmount.biz.st:2357/
how to paginate?

[KyleAMathews]

Not yet...