Accessing site.data doesn't work as expected with collections_dir specified

[robcarruthers]

Testing/Dev Environment:

❯ bundle exec bridgetown -v
bridgetown 1.2.0 "Bonny Slope"
❯ ruby -v --yjit
ruby 3.2.2 (2023-03-30 revision e51014f9c0) +YJIT [arm64-darwin22]
❯ sw_vers
ProductName:		macOS
ProductVersion:		13.5
BuildVersion:		22G5038d

Test repo:

git clone git@github.com:robcarruthers/bridgetown_test_site.git

To Reproduce
Testing with a new site:

bridgetown new test_site -t erb

Add the following site data

# src/_data/navbar.yml
title: Brand Title
icon: fa-rocket

Then in the console:

❯ bin/bt console
irb(main):001:0> site.data.navbar
{
  "title" => "Brand Title",                                                         
   "icon" => "fa-rocket"                                                            
}

Add a collections directory as per the docs

# bridgetown.config.yml
collections_dir: my_collections

then in the console:

irb(main):001:0> site.data.navbar
nil
irb(main):002:0> site.data
{}
irb(main):003:0> site.metadata.title
nil

Expected behavior
I guess I expected all of the the navbar dataset and the site metadata to be available under the same accessors. My first attempt to fix this was to copy to the _data folder to my_collections, because that's what the docs say to do with the _posts folder, but unfortunately that gave me more unexpected behaviour

irb(main):001:0> site.data.navbar
nil
irb(main):002:0> site.data
{
  "_data" => {                                  
           "navbar" => {                        
      "title" => "Brand Title",                 
       "icon" => "fa-rocket"                    
    },                                          
    "site_metadata" => {                        
            "title" => "Your awesome title",    
          "tagline" => "This site is totally awesome",
            "email" => "your-email@example.com",
      "description" => "Write an awesome description for your new site here. It will appear in your document head meta (for Google search results) and in your feed.xml site description."
    }                                           
  }                                             
}                                               
irb(main):003:0> site.data._data.navbar
{
  "title" => "Brand Title",                                                               
   "icon" => "fa-rocket"                                                                  
}

Additional context
I have made a few assumptions about how this should work and I'd be happy for someone to point me in the right direction or detail my errors. But I think the docs are a bit ambiguous in this regards too.

Anyway, If this is a bug or just something that needs tidying up, I'd be really happy to contribute a PR to make this more seamless and intuitive. I'll need some guidance on the best implementation and where best place to start.

[jaredcwhite]

@robcarruthers Thanks Rob. Data is a special collection that I would expect would need to be relocated to the custom folder (aka my_collections/_data) along with the other collections. That it then adds in an extra _data key is unexpected, aka a bug. I'd love a PR and am happy to assist.

[robcarruthers]

No worries, happy to help.

I don't really know where to start looking. I don't expect its something you keep front of mind either, but a high level view of how the site object is created initially and made available to the views would be a good place to start.