zola/docs/content/documentation/content/overview.md

+++ title = "Overview" weight = 10 +++

Zola uses the folder structure to determine the site structure. Each folder in the content directory represents a section that contains pages: your .md files.

.
└── content
    ├── content
    │   └── something.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/content/something/
    ├── blog
    │   ├── cli-usage.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/cli-usage/
    │   ├── configuration.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/configuration/
    │   ├── directory-structure.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/directory-structure/
    │   ├── _index.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/
    │   └── installation.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/installation/
    └── landing
        └── _index.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/landing/

Each page path (the part after the base_url, for example blog/cli-usage/) can be customised by changing the path or slug attribute of the page front-matter.

You might have noticed a file named _index.md in the example above. This file is used to store both metadata and content of the section itself and is not considered a page.

To make sure the terminology used in the rest of the documentation is understood, let's go over the example above.

The content directory in this case has three sections: content, blog and landing. The content section has only one page, something.md, the landing section has no page and the blog section has 4 pages: cli-usage.md, configuration.md, directory-structure.md and installation.md.

While not shown in the example, sections can be nested indefinitely.

Assets colocation

The content directory is not limited to markup files though: it's natural to want to co-locate a page and some related assets, for instance images or spreadsheets. Zola supports that pattern out of the box for both sections and pages.

Any non-markdown file you add in the page/section folder will be copied alongside the generated page when building the site, which allows us to use a relative path to access them.

For pages to use assets colocation, they should not be placed directly in their section folder (such as latest-experiment.md), but as an index.md file in a dedicated folder (latest-experiment/index.md), like so:

└── research
    ├── latest-experiment
    │   ├── index.md
    │   └── yavascript.js
    ├── _index.md
    └── research.jpg

In this setup, you may access research.jpg from your 'research' section, and yavascript.js from your 'latest-experiment' directly within the Markdown:

Check out the complete program [here](yavascript.js). It's **really cool free-software**!

By default, this page will get the folder name as its slug. So its permalink would be in the form of https://example.com/research/latest-experiment/

Excluding files from assets

It is possible to ignore selected asset files using the ignored_content setting in the config file. For example, say you have an Excel spreadsheet from which you are taking several screenshots and then linking to those image files on your website. For maintainability purposes, you want to keep the spreadsheet in the same folder as the markdown, but you don't want to copy the spreadsheet to the public web site. You can achieve this by simply setting ignored_content in the config file:

ignored_content = ["*.xlsx"]

Static assets

In addition to placing content files in the content directory, you may also place content files in the static directory. Any files/folders that you place in the static directory will be copied, without modification, to the public directory.

Typically, you might put site-wide assets (such as the site favicon, site logos or site-wide JavaScript) in the root of the static directory. You can also place any HTML or other files that you wish to be included without modification (that is, without being parsed as Markdown files) into the static directory.

Note that the static folder provides an alternative to colocation. For example, imagine that you had the following directory structure (a simplified version of the structure presented above):

.
└── content
    └── blog
        ├── configuration
        │    └── index.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/configuration/
        └── _index.md // -> https://mywebsite.com/blog/

If you wanted to add an image to the https://mywebsite.com/blog/configuration page, you would have three options:

• You could save the image to the content/blog/configuration folder and then link it with a relative path from the index.md page. This is the approach described under colocation, above.
• You could save the image to a static/blog/configuration folder and link it in exactly the same way as if you had colocated it. If you do this, the generated files will be identical to if you had colocated; the only difference will be that all static files will be saved in the static folder rather than in the content folder. Depending on your organizational needs, this may be better or worse.
• Or you could save the image to some arbitrary folder within the static folder. For example, you could save all images to static/images. Using this approach, you would no longer be able to use relative links, but could use an absolute link to images/[filename] to access your image. This might be preferable for small sites or for sites that associate images with multiple pages (e.g., logo images that appear on every page).