Feature request: sections show *all* child pages

[davidyoung604]

Idea

When using sections I want to be able to see descendant pages (i.e. children, regardless of how many layers deep in the folder structure) not just those directly in the selected section.

Example

For posts in nested folder structures (e.g. /2026/01/01/new-year-new-me/) accessing /2026/01/ would show "New year, new me" and "January's month-end review".

Current behaviour

• If a folder is not configured as a section, it will show the 404 page.
• If a folder is configured as a section, it will apparently only show the direct child entries, or the single most recent if it's one layer down (and not a section - yes, I realize this sounds odd. Feel free to confirm the behaviour)
  • If /2026/01/31/ does not have _index.md, /2026/01/ will show "January's month-end review", but not "New year, new me", whereas /2026/ will show "0 posts".
  • But if /2026/01/31/ *does* have _index.md, /2026/will show "0 posts", as will/2026/01/`.

State on my side

I have a half-baked POC for this that I haven't pushed to my repo yet, as I realized I haven't verified it with multiple pages of results. I have a feeling it's going to need some rework to get it into a shareable state.

Other note

In playing around with this, I realized that the title isn't fully formed when viewing the sections. It's just | My Site Title with nothing before the |. Should this be "Posts"? Or "Posts in /2026/01"?

[Livour]

I think this is a great idea and a natural progression for the theme.

Regarding the recursive listing: Have you tried using .RegularPagesRecursive? (Documentation: gohugo.io/methods/page/regularpagesrecursive/). It seems designed specifically for this use case and might simplify your POC significantly.

I agree that this feature will really shine once we have a robust Archives page. You mentioned seeing '0 posts' currently; I actually implemented a basic version of an archive, you can see it here: managuide.blog/archive/. I’m not entirely happy with the current implementation, but it’s a start.

I think a good path forward would be:

1. Refining the recursive logic using Hugo's built-in methods.
2. Refactoring the archive logic into modular HTML components so they can be reused for these deep-folder sections.

[davidyoung604]

Yeah, I was trying to use .RegularPagesRecursive, but it turns out I was using it wrong. Once I added enough posts to exceed the default page size, it gave me a full list (so partway there) but no paginating. I finally figured out what I was doing wrong, so it truncated the results on the first page to 10 (the default page size) but didn't show any way to get to subsequent pages.

I ended up on the pagination docs. Once I added this partial and called it in /layouts/_default/list.htmlI at least get an unstyled list of pages (note that the list of posts is still styled) and can navigate back-and-forth.

I've pushed the changes to a branch in my repo if you want to play with it. Just the one commit.

EDIT: I'm not much of a CSS person, but I can try my hand at it tomorrow, unless you're interested in taking it on.

[Livour]

Pagination is an entirely separate feature that should be added. To be frank, I postponed adding it as my own blog does not have enough posts to justify it, but I will probably add a styled version asap. As it's hinders your progress

Edit:
Done in #59
I also made scripts to add/remove mock posts for testing this:
https://gist.github.com/Livour/7e8dd5930a134cdee81299b038962342

[davidyoung604]

Sorry, forgot to reply. Thanks so much for putting in the effort to make pagination happen! I tested it out locally and it looks great.

And just to keep you in the loop about my attempts: I've been trying to wrap my head around the differences in rendering when sections either are or aren't used. I'm not sure if I just completely lack understanding on what's passed in internally, or if it's actually using different templates under the hood.

As an example, without the .RegularPagesRecursive update, /posts/ will show all the posts only if sections aren't used (i.e. no _index.md in the folder hierarchy). So I've been trying to dig through more docs to figure out what's going on:

• template selection
• template lookup order
• new template system as of v0.146.0
• history for the sections documentation

I'm still trying to map out the contents of those pages in my head in my free time, and cross-referencing any templates they mention with contents of this repo, versus what's in the Hugo repo to see if I can make sense of it all.