Default sort order of articles

[jennybc]

I've been playing with pkgdown to check that some of what I say in R Packages is actually correct.

I sat down to write about the article index and I wanted to say what its default is. For example, the reference index defaults to alphabetical. I assumed I would find the same is true for the articles, but I was wrong. Or, rather, it is alphabetical for some definition of alphabetical, but not the one I expected.

The toy package has 2 vignettes (alfa and bravo) and 1 non-vignette article (charlie).

$vignettes
# A tibble: 3 × 6
  name             file_in                        file_out              title   description depth
  <fs::path>       <fs::path>                     <fs::path>            <chr>   <chr>       <int>
1 alfa             vignettes/alfa.Rmd             articles/alfa.html    alfa    NA              1
2 articles/charlie vignettes/articles/charlie.Rmd articles/charlie.html charlie NA              1
3 bravo            vignettes/bravo.Rmd            articles/bravo.html   bravo   NA              1

Here's what the default article index looks like:

So the default order appears to be based on file_in, with the leading vignettes stripped off. Which is going to insert any non-vignette articles in the articles subdirectory very early in the list. I think either of these orderings are a more expected default:

• Alphabetical on basename(file_out)
• Vignettes, then non-vignette articles, alphabetical within each category