Allow sidebar groups to have their own content

[lucasmdjl]

What version of starlight are you using?

0.28.3

What is your idea?

Allow groups in the sidebar to not just group pages together, but also have a page of their own you can read when you click the group.

Why is this feature necessary?

Right now, you can have an index.mdx in a group and with the automatic configuration, it gets translated into a new page with the slug of the group, the title of the group, but a different entry in the sidebar. I think, I would be cleaner to have the index.mdx of the group (if present) be a page associated with the group itself, not just another page inside the group. This will help introduce different sections of the documentation in a safer and more concise way. For instance, the approach I'm using in my documentation is to label index as Overview, and then also manually edit the prev and next attributes of the following and previous pages to be the section name, which can lead to errors when pages are reordered or if the section is renamed.

Do you have examples of this feature in other projects?

• https://docusaurus.io/docs/docs-introduction
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-reference.html

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this feature.

[HiDeoo]

Thanks for the feedback.

Just for reference and add some initial context to the discussion, linking to this comment which describes the current reasoning regarding the current behavior:

In particular, we’ve had questions before about making the heading of a sidebar group also a link to the index page, but I think this results in confusing UX. Docusaurus does this and you essentially end up with an entry that does different things depending where you click on it:

click here to go to page
     ↓
Group title    >
               ↑
    click here to expand group

[lucasmdjl]

Hi, thanks for the link to that comment.

I can see why it could be a bit confusing to have a click do different things when clicking in the name and clicking on the arrow, though I personally haven't found it confusing when I've encountered it.

However, I think the current approach of having a child page with the same name as the group can be confusing too, and to be honest I have never seen it on a documentation website. Also, another issue with this is that the urls and the sidebar structure don't match, with the url of the index page being the parent url to its sidebar-sibling pages.

Since this feature request seems recurrent, why not support both designs? I.e. without an index page the group name could just collapse/expand, and with an index page it could also link to it.