Why can't I display the Archive and Categories layouts by default when I use the Built-in blog plugin?

[jygzyc]

When I use the Built-in blog plugin with the following configuration, the sidebar layout is empty. Could there be an issue with my settings?

#plugins
plugins:
  - blog:
        blog_dir: blog
        post_url_date_format: yyyy/MM
        post_url_format: "{date}/{file}"
        archive: true
        categories: true

What can I do to restore the expected behavior?

[alexvoss]

@squidfunk, this is odd. I can replicate the problem by using the blog-basic example, which built just fine when it was deployed to GitHub Pages. I tried various versions (latest Insiders from GitHub as well as the latest public release). I still hope this is a configuration error but it seems that at least two people on this planet managed to produce it.

Somewhat unrelated: I tried to build the blog-basic example as part of the whole set of examples - and it crashed my machine. It seems to run into endless forking? (I seem to remember there were some recent changes to the logic and some people reporting issues in Docker?) So, at the moment I am only able to say that it does not produce the archive and categories navigation when used stand-alone.

[squidfunk]

It's currently only mentioned here at the moment. It's also why I mentioned countless times that we desperately need to rework the blog setup guide and provide starters and examples because many users seem to have problems setting things up 😉 As you're currently building a blog starter template, reworking the blog setup guide is something that would provide immense value, because it will help us bring down the number of opened discussions and allow us to provide a better DX.

[squidfunk]

I'm currently focusing my work on tags, projects and search. I will not be able to rework the documentation in the next coming months, so I need to rely on the help of contributors. The tags plugin will also need reworked documentation once it's stable, because the possibilities will be insane compared to now.

[alexvoss]

Ok, I will do a PR for the documentation and also fix up the example to show how navigation should be configured.

[alexvoss]

The update to the documentation is now published.. Hope this makes it easier to get started with blogs.