CleanBlog: Specify a different navbar title from the page title

[VikeMK]

I have a statiq site using CleanBlog which has an "About Me" page that is linked in the navbar, I would like to make it so that the page's title in the navbar is "About" and the page's title when in the header is "About Me". It seems that currently both of them are pulled from the same document property: Title, so there isn't a way to set them differently without overriding the template files. Is this something that could be added to the template? Or is there maybe a simpler way to achieve this?

[daveaglick]

It seems that currently both of them are pulled from the same document property: Title

Yep, that's right on. More specifically, the theme file _navbar.cshtml that renders the navigation bar uses the HTML helper @Html.DocumentLink() to render the link to each top-level document. That helper does indeed use Title to get the text to use for the link.

there isn't a way to set them differently without overriding the template files

Also true (at the moment at least). One nice thing is that because of the way the input folder takes precedence over the theme folder, you wouldn't have to actually edit the theme files to change this behavior. If you put a file with the same name in your input folder as in the theme folder, the one in your own input folder with override it. So one way to change this is to drop a new _navbar.cshtml file in your input folder with slightly different logic. This is actually exactly why the theme uses partials for some things like the navigation bar - to make them easier to customize.

In this case, you could introduce a new front matter property called something like NavTitle and then use that in your custom _navbar.cshtml:

<ul class="navbar-nav ml-auto">
    @foreach(IDocument doc in OutputPages.GetChildrenOf("index.html").Where(x => x.GetBool("ShowInNavbar", true)).OrderBy(x => x.GetInt(Keys.Order)))
    {
        // Don't add the home page to the nav bar
        if (doc.Destination != "index.html")
        {
            <li class="nav-item">
                @Html.DocumentLink(
                    doc,
                    doc.GetString("NavTitle", doc.GetTitle()),
                    new Dictionary<object, object> { { "class", "nav-link" } })
            </li>
        }
    }
</ul>

Is this something that could be added to the template?

That's a good question. It would be trivial to change the official _navbar.cshtml file in the CleanBlog theme to match the above and it seems like a good little enhancement. I'll go ahead and update it now.

[daveaglick]

Update CleanBlog, ended up calling the new metadata NavbarTitle