Better ways of sorting & naming pages

Hey, I’m enjoying nextra a lot, here’s a couple of nitpicks and things I’d like to suggest about sorting & naming.

Right now, order of entries meta.json is what sets the order & title of the page. This means that I could name my pages like:

01-intro.mdx
02-getting-started.md
03-end.md

This also sorts them correctly in the editor and filesystems

They’d already be sorted alphabetically in the menu, but I’d still have to manually create a meta.json with the renames.

My proposal is, while leaving everything as is, adding the ability to rename via frontmatter, I noticed that I can use

---
title: Intro
---

to change the <title /> of the page, it would be convenient if this, or another key, were used to also set the name in the nav.

Thanks anyway for your time and kudos on the project!

[shuding]

Thanks for the great suggestions! I agree with both of you that those can be improved.

Currently there’re some technical restrictions that I need to dig a little deeper. For the meta.json thing, what I’m thinking about is performance of I/O. Because every page renders the sidebar, which depends on name and order of all pages, so to render the sidebar we need to access:

1. structure of the filesystem (recursively readdir)
2. content of all meta.json files (a couple of readfile)

If we store that info (name and order of all pages) with frontmatter, we need to access the content of all files. I never did benchmarking but I believe that will become a performance issue when you have many many pages. Although I opened #34 for some related perf improvements, but it seems still very necessary to do some pressure testing. 😃

Regarding the customized slug, we need to bypass the restriction of Next.js that “route name === file name”, which isn’t that easy.

Also personally I’m not a big fan of number based ordering (but I can see how good it organizes the files in the filesystem). Imagine that if want to insert/remove/reorder a page, you’ll have to rename many other files to make the numbers look good. With meta.json it’s much easier.

[Janpot]

As an alternative, could it make sense to define the pages order in the frontmatter of index.mdx?

---
order:
- introduction
- installation
- getting-started
- ...
---