Page.GetTerms order is inconsistent and overrides term order in front matter

[gcushen]

The implementation in #6905 differs in behaviour to the previous approach and ignores the order that the user defined the terms.

This causes issues in sites where the order of terms is important, such as when displaying page authors from an author taxonomy.

See the reports at

• Add Page.GetTerms #6905 (comment)
• https://spectrum.chat/academic/help/author-sorting-in-publications-broken~c2c846b2-72dc-41e6-a369-b7fa83d00094

The goal in #6905 was to be able to rewrite

{{ $taxo := "tags" }} <!-- Use the plural form here -->
<ul id="{{ $taxo }}">
    {{ range .Param $taxo }}
        {{ $name := . }}
        {{ with $.Site.GetPage (printf "/%s/%s" $taxo ($name | urlize)) }}
            <li><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ $name }}</a></li>
        {{ end }}
    {{ end }}
</ul>

as something like:

<ul>
    {{ range (.GetTerms "tags") }}
        <li><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .LinkTitle }}</a></li>
   {{ end }}
</ul>

However, the order of GetTerms differs to the earlier approach and ignores the order that the user defined the terms.

The order is very important to users when using taxonomies for things such as authors. For example, users expect if they define someone as the main author of a page, Hugo respects the order and lists that author first.

It appears that GetTerms ignores the order of terms defined in a pages front matter and there is no way for user to workaround this without fixing the order in Hugo itself to respect the order defined in the front matter and be consistent with the earlier approach.

What version of Hugo are you using (hugo version)?

Hugo Static Site Generator v0.69.2/extended darwin/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes

[Aariq]

This breaks the author order for publications on my website in a way which could be misconstrued as disingenuous. Would be great to get the old behavior back.

[bep]

I will try to fix this, but note that the order isn't "inconsistent" or random or anything

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.