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Site Documentation: Managing Collections & Navigation
This guide explains the technical backbone of the site: how content is organized using Jekyll Collections and standard Folders, and how those sources build the sidebar Navigation menu.
The site uses a hybrid model to balance automation with reliability:
Hawthorne Guild
_rules, _playersguide, etc.): These folders start with an underscore. They are “official” Jekyll content buckets. Individual pages added here are automatically indexed into the site system.lore, arcana, field-guide, etc.): These are standard directories in the root. They are used for major site hubs to ensure maximum routing stability (preventing “404 Not Found” errors).The sidebar menu is controlled by a single file: /_data/navigation.yml. This file is the “Manager” for the entire site’s structure.
There are three ways an item appears in the sidebar:
Used for simple pages like Allowed Content or FAQ.
- title: "FAQ"
url: /faq.html
Used for “Books” where we want a dropdown that automatically lists every page inside.
- title: "Rules & Roles"
collection: rules
type: dropdown)Used for root folders (lore, arcana, etc.) to provide the same “accordion” look as a collection while using stable folder links.
- title: "Server Lore"
type: dropdown
sections:
- title: "Contents"
url: /lore/
- title: "About Hawthorne"
url: /lore/about-hawthorne/
Individual markdown files (.md) require “Front Matter” at the top to let Jekyll know how to display them:
---
layout: doc
title: "My New Rule"
order: 50
background_image: /assets/images/mybackground.jpg
---
| Front Matter | Description |
|---|---|
| layout | Always doc for standard documents. |
| title | The visible name of the page. |
| order | Sets the sorting order (10, 20, 30…) in the sidebar submenu. |
| permalink | IMPORTANT: For pages in root folders, manually set the clean URL here (e.g., permalink: /lore/about-hawthorne/). |
| background_image | Sets a custom background image for the page header. |
[!TIP] If you add a new page to a Collection (like the Player’s Guide), it will appear in the sidebar automatically. If you add a page to a Root Folder (like Lore), you must manually add its link to
/_data/navigation.yml.