Show a teaser on the blog listing page.

[JoshOrndorff]

Summary and motivation

I would like my blog listing page to show a "teaser" of the content in the post. It could be as simple as the first 300 characters or something like that.

I didn't see a way to do this with current tabi settings.

I can make my site look the say I want by copying the first 300 characters into the description in the frontmatter, but I prefer not to duplicate the content.

Implementation details

No response

Checklist

• I've searched existing issues to make sure this feature hasn't already been requested.
• This feature aligns with tabi's philosophy (minimal JS, accessible…)
• I'm willing to contribute to the implementation of this feature.

[welpo]

Hi @JoshOrndorff!

I don't think it's documented anywhere (I should fix this), but tabi is compatible with Zola's summary feature.

This means you can do this:

Actual text of your post…
<!-- more -->

And it will include everything up to the <!-- more --> tag on the post's listing.

Give it a try and let me know if that's what you wanted!

[JoshOrndorff]

Thank you for pointing out the summary feature. I was not aware of that. This is a big step in the right direction. But one little bit remains.

My site has a type of post that are micro blogs: usually only a sentence or two long, few hundred characters max. For these micro blogs, the summary should typically be the entire content. This can be achieved by having content creators put a <!-- more --> at the very end of the content.

However this could easily be forgotten and is an annoyance even when one remembers. Can I have the summary default to the full content (rather than empty) when no summary break is explicitly set?

[welpo]

That is something that I considered while replying to you.

I've seen some sites using tabi with empty descriptions (no description and no summary). It feels a bit empty.

We could take the first n characters of the post, truncate (preferably not mid-word, not sure this is possible, specially considering some languages like Japanese don't use spaces), and append …

This shouldn't be too hard to implement. We'd need to use it consistently though (e.g. include atom.xml template). And perhaps add a config option to enable/disable this. I'd lean towards enabling it by default and marking the change as breaking, but I'd like to see it in action first.

Would you be interested in working on this feature? I'd be happy to provide assistance in any way (review/complete the PR, answer questions…).

Let me know!

[JoshOrndorff]

Okay, so basically, I initially really wanted to help with this. I am brand new to Zola and its templating. But I am a Rust developer and I am ready and willing to learn Zola.

However, I am really hesitating about committing to zola because I'm worried that it's base_url is incompatible with IPFS deployment as I've described here and here. This is getting off-topic for this issue, but I didn't want to leave your generous offer for mentorship unanswered.

[welpo]

Ah, I see your concern with IPFS compatibility. Fair enough!

Thanks for getting back, and no worries :) Adding some labels to see if someone wants to contribute.