How to maintain a custom nav structure

[oskarrough]

middleman-navtree automatically (over)writes a tree.yml reflecting the structure in /source which is great. What is the recommened way of maintaining a custom structure? Say a different ordering if you're files aren't prefixed with a number.

Copy/paste the tree.yml, duplicate it and modify it and reference it in config.rb in the navtree settings?

And thanks for the great plugin!

[oskarrough]

Or say with a structure like so:

How would you remove the prefixes "1-" etc.?

[bryanbraun]

@oskarrough, that's an interesting idea. This is an issue that's been floating in the back of my mind for a while.

The number prefixing should work fine for ordering... so is the issue is that you just want cleaner directory names in the nav?

If so, then maybe instead of pasting all of tree.yml into the settings, what if we just added a setting that accepted a key-value hash of specific directory name overrides? Something like this:

options.dir_name_overrides = { "1-Preface" => "Preface", "2-Front-end" => "Front-end"}

We shouldn't need filename overrides because discover_title should take care of that.

I'd have to figure out how to work that logic on the backend, but does that address the issue?

[assimovt]

Got the same problem. The idea of overriding directory names sounds good, so :+1: for it.

[bryanbraun]

@assimovt submitted a pull request that included an option to manually manage the tree.yml file. It's described here in detail.

In short, you get an option to prevent further updates to tree.yml, once the file has been generated. That way you can manually edit it to use whatever Titles and URLs you want. To enable the option, you would include this line with your navtree settings in config.rb:

options.automatic_tree_updates = false

I liked the approach, so after a bit of discussion I went ahead and integrated it. The README.md has been updated to include this new option and I've pushed it up to rubygems as part of the middleman-navtree 0.1.9 version.

I'm considering this issue closed. Thanks for the great discussion and resolution!