Support vignette on CRAN but excluded from pkgdown website

[cbailiss]

Feature request: Allow vignettes to be excluded from the pkgdown website but still present in the R Project, e.g. for CRAN.

Example: I have two versions of vignette - one is shorter for CRAN (builds in less time to meet CRAN constraints) and a longer more detailed version for the pkgdown website. Previously I could simply omit vignettes from the _pkgdown.yml file index contents (and a warning would be issued) however now an error is generated.

A couple of ideas:

• A new setting where vignettes to be ignored can be listed.
• A new setting that specifies to raise warnings instead of errors if vignettes are missing from the index.

For related discussion see #2202 and #2055.

[dbosak01]

I have a related use case where I have a page that I want on the pkgdown website, but not in the Articles menu. I have it linking from the top navbar instead. It is a Frequently Asked Questions page that I think should be visible as soon as the user enters the site. So I need the page compiled and added to the site, but not included in the Articles list. I was able to to this on previous versions of pkgdown. Now it seems difficult or impossible given the new restrictions, which (honestly), I can't understand. It seems a warning would have been sufficient.

[keller-mark]

I have a similar use case as above @dbosak01. Pkgdown site here for reference: https://vitessce.github.io/vitessceR/

I include articles on my site by including them in the navbar -> components part of the _pkgdown.yml configuration https://github.com/vitessce/vitessceR/blob/main/pkgdown/_pkgdown.yml#L14 rather than articles. This allows me to create a more custom navbar that separates articles into multiple sections (Examples and Articles), use sub-headings in the dropdowns, and add a link to an external documentation website.

I now need to pin to pkgdown v2.0.4 because my site does not build in the current version.

A parameter for build_site that allows downgrading this behavior to a warning rather than an error would be great

[hadley]

I'd suggest we handle this the same way as references: if a section has title "internal", we silently drop it — i.e. data_articles_index_section() gains an is_internal field and then data_articles_index() removes from the list after the check for missing articles.

[hadley]

If anyone is still interested in this issue, I'd really appreciate any reviews of the associated PR: #2497