About performances, and folder structure

1

Hi, as suggested in many posts also here on this forum, I always organized pages and sub-pages using a year/month structure like this one:

articles
|–2018
|----01
|----02
|----…
|–2019
|----01
|----02
|----…

Most of the queries though are about displaying articles sorted by date.
I always use a syntax like:

$pages->find(‘articles’)->grandChildren()->children()->sortBy(‘date’,‘asc’)

And, if I need to get the articles of a certain year, I just use a query like

$pages->find(‘articles’)->grandChildren()->children()->filter(function($child) use($year){
return $child->date()->toDate(‘Y’) === $year;
});

Question is: is this the correct approach, or (having performances in mind) should I consider the year based folder - assuming all the articles of that year are stored in the correct folder (which unfortunately is not always the case)? Something like

$pages->find(‘articles/’ . $year)->grandChildren()

?

thanks

2

If you know the year, you only have to get the year folder, so $site->find('articles/2018')->grandChildren() would be the best approach, instead of filtering the whole lot. Much shorter and you don’t have to read the content files.

I’d use:

page('articles')->index()->template('article')->sortBy('date', 'asc');
3

On a side note, you can define your articles collection one as Kirby collection and then reuse across your site (without having to redefine if you need the collection in multiple places):

1 Like
4

Thanks for the answer.

What index() exactly does? I’ve read on Kirby reference that “it create a flat child index”, but in practice…? And why using the template method?

I need to understand…

5

I never used Collections. I tried to solve the same problem (reuse the most used queries through the site) with a plugin. So I can pass to the function some arguments if I need to filter the query.

Do collection makes more sense?

(Sorry to bother you, I’m a heavy user of Kirby kb but…)

6

Excactly, index() gives you a flat list of all pages under a given page. The reason why I added the filter by template is because otherwise the list would include the parent pages (year and month folders)

7

Not necessarily, e.g. you cannot pass parameters to a collection.

8

Interesting. How would this work if one’s blog structure as far as the file system is concerned is something like

content/2023/Nov/03/a-blog-post-for-something/

?

9

Not sure what exactly you mean. To get what result?

10

Sorry, I thought that would be contextual. To call simple reverse-chron lists of blogs posts; I guess to start with on the homepage whuch will at least get my head pointed in the right direction.