Add support for sections with pages

Currently, a parent nav item (one which contains children) cannot have a page attached to it, as stated in the MkDocs documentation.

This means that in the following navigation structure, I can’t link from other topics to the general “Products” page, which is inconvenient:

nav:
    - Home: index.md
    - Products:
        - Product A: product-a.md
        - Product B: product-a.md
    - Support: support.md

However, as @waylan pointed out in this comment, this could be overriden by a template.

It would be great if material supported waylan’s suggested implementation.

[wilhelmer]

Personally I think that collapsibility of sections (especially on mobile) outweighs the need to put your content in a separate page (coming first) in your section.

Typically, yes. But our doc site has a super uncommonly low amount of mobile users (around 1.2%), mainly because it’s usually accessed from a desktop app. So we might think different about that. It always depends.

Anyway, thanks for the insight and the discussion!

[squidfunk]

Haha that’s the point. Good UX is very hard 😉 Personally I think that collapsibility of sections (especially on mobile) outweighs the need to put your content in a separate page (coming first) in your section. Otherwise mobile navigation might be a lot of scrolling, which can be quite A LOT for huge documentation projects. I currently solve this problem by naming the first page within a section “Overview” or something similar.

It’s always a trade-off, no matter which way you look.

EDIT: Also, note that we would need to implement this as an optional thing, because making it mandatory would mean that there will always need to be an index page. Some people might argue that they don’t want that, because content is mutually exclusive aaaaand we’re back to square one. However, making it optional would only lead to more confusion. I think we should just leave it as it is. If one wants to change it, theme extension is always a possibility.