0017: Sidebar order

Context#

The sidebar lists every project with its records, grouped by type. Listed by record number, the records a team wrote last week sit at the bottom of a long list, while the ones people open most are usually the latest. A team with a hundred decisions has to scroll past all of them to reach what was just accepted.

Some archives read better in number order, for example when records are a numbered series that people cite by number, so the old order has to stay available.

Decision#

The sidebar lists records newest first. “Newest” means the record date (from front matter, or from git when git.dates is on). Records with the same date are ordered by number, highest first, and records without a date come last.

The sidebar.sort option picks the order:

Plain pages inside a project keep their order from front matter. The previous and next links at the bottom of a record follow the record number whatever the sidebar shows, so “previous” always means the record before it in the series.

How to use it#

Leave the option out to get the newest records at the top. To go back to number order:

1
import { defineConfig } from '@tilaven/inkan';
2

3
export default defineConfig({
4
  sidebar: { sort: 'number' },
5
});

Consequences#

• New decisions show up at the top of their project, where people look first.
• Sites upgrading from an earlier version see a different sidebar order until they set sidebar: { sort: 'number' }.
• A record without a date sinks to the end of its group in both date orders, which is a nudge to date it.