What should I do on writing plugins when each document's metadata affects other documents?

[McDic]

I was writing a plugin for my own blog. I was trying to provide list of recently edited posts on index page and I decided to generate special HTML for index page only. But since I am not developing a theme(I use mkdocs-material), I decided to alter markdown text for easier development.

According to Mkdocs plugin development documentation, html page is constructed after on_page_markdown and modified by on_page_content, independently on each page.

It seems there isn't any straightforward way to make kind of synchronized global event during some step of populate_page process. Is mkdocs implemented in this way because of page building performance, or is there any other reason?

I think letting post metadata affect global navigation and optionally some other pages is a valid usecase for many users. So my final questions are..

• What should I do as easy bandaid patch for this?
• Will mkdocs provide easier interface to make custom global events and synchronizations at some point?

[oprypin]

You can make a particular page be rendered last. That way you can ensure all other pages' events have run by the time you reach that one.

Inside an on_files handler do this:

file = files.get_file_from_path('index.md')
files.remove(file)
files.append(file)

Or just append a fresh file without removing anything in the first place

[oprypin]

A plugin that does this: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blob/44982451f7759ed65e31d1151b3c49566b8c6ca0/material/plugins/tags/plugin.py#L129

[McDic]

Thank you. This can be a quick patch, although this kind of way only works when file dependencies form a DAG. Not sure if that manual manipulation of files is intended and encouraged by mkdocs. If that is the case, I guess this is better being documented.

[oprypin]

To make a page's content affect navigation, that needs to be done in on_files. Only the raw content of files is available though.

[oprypin]

A plugin that does this: https://github.com/oprypin/mkdocs-literate-nav/blob/fb047ef72f1a65ca305852933c2a7f100a7279d7/mkdocs_literate_nav/plugin.py#L36