The navigation in the side-panel is generated from the following folder structure:

navigation/
.
├── child-page-1.md
├── child-page-2.md
├── child-page-3.md
├── external-link.json
├── group/
│   ├── index.json
│   ├── nested-page-1.md
│   ├── nested-page-2.md
│   └── nested-page-3.md
├── index.md
└── internal-link.json

It uses the frontMatterFileReader and navigationFileReader to read the documents:

await docs.build([
    {
        include: "docs/**/*.md",
        basePath: "./docs/",
        fileReader: frontMatterFileReader,
    },
    {
        include: "docs/**/*.json",
        basePath: "./docs/",
        fileReader: navigationFileReader,
    },
]);

Hiding pages

Each file will be present in the navigation unless the visible attribute is set to false, e.g.:

---
title: My hidden page
visible: false
---

This page will be rendered but will not be visible in the menu.
It can be linked to by other means.

If a section (index.md) is hidden it will still generate a navigation tree but will not be rendered in the menu.

Expandable groups

Each folder with new files will be a expandable group. To set the title of the group create a new index.json with the title attribute set:

{
    "title": "My awesome group"
}

Links

Custom links can be created by adding a json file with both the title and href property set, e.g. external-link.json:

{
    "title": "My awesome link",
    "href": "https://example.net"
}

If the href starts with http://, https:// or // it is considered an external link. Otherwise it is considered a link relative to the output folder. It is recommended to start such hrefs with a single / for better clarity.

Sorting

Sorting uses the optional sortorder attribute:

---
title: My Awesome Page
sortorder: 1
---

Pages with the sortorder attributes are sorted with the lower number appearing higher. Pages sharing the same sortorder or when sortorder is omitted are sorted alphabetically, for instance:

• title: Foo, sortorder: 1 - Appears first
• title: Bar, sortorder: 2 - Appears together with "Baz", sorted alphabetically
• title: Baz, sortorder: 2 - Appears together with "Bar", sorted alphabetically
• title: Tux, sortorder: 3 - Appears after "Bar" and "Baz"
• title: Barney, - Appears last, sorted alphabetically
• title: Fred, - Appears last, sorted alphabetically

Page title

Normally the title shown in the navigation is read from the title attribute of the document. If the shortTitle attribute is set it is used instead.

---
title: A longer title unsuitable for the navigation
sort-title: Shorter title
---