How properties become navigation

Take three documents:

KB4IT builds:

• Category.html, listing the values Procedure and Incident.
• Category_Procedure.html, listing the two procedures.
• Tag.html, plus Tag_backup.html and Tag_postgresql.html.

Add a property to one document and its pages appear on the next build. Remove the last document that uses a value and its page goes away.

There is no fixed list of properties. A team that writes runbooks may use Server, Product and Team; a reading list may use Author and Genre. Whatever you use consistently becomes the way readers browse the site.

A few habits keep the navigation clean:

• Use the same spelling every time: PostgreSQL and Postgresql are two values.
• Prefer a specific property to a generic tag: Product: nginx gives readers a Product menu, while Tag: nginx hides it among other tags.
• Keep property names singular: Tag, not Tags.

• Title comes from the # heading and is never a property page.
• Date sorts documents and feeds calendars; it has no value pages.
• Properties listed in ignored_keys in repo.json stay in the documents but get no pages. Use it for values that are unique per document, such as a ticket number.

When you change a property, KB4IT recompiles the document and every page that lists it, so a renamed category never leaves stale lists behind. This is why changing properties takes a little longer than changing text.