Editorial sections

How Project Broadsheet organizes articles by top-level category, how each section gets its own index, RSS feed, and accent color, and how to customize or add new sections.

An editorial section is the highest level of organization in Project Broadsheet. News, Opinion, Reviews: each is a section. Every article belongs to exactly one. Each section gets:

• A top-level URL (/news/, /opinion/, etc.) with a paginated article index.
• Its own RSS feed at /{section}/feed.xml.
• An accent color applied to section badges, breadcrumbs, and dividers.
• A dedicated entry in site navigation.

The default sections

Project Broadsheet ships with these editorial sections defined in the sections data file:

1. News: breaking, reporting, factual
2. Opinion: editorials and commentary
3. Analysis: deeper reads
4. Arts & Culture: criticism, features
5. Science & Tech: research, products
6. History: long-form historical pieces
7. Letters: reader correspondence
8. Reviews: books, films, podcasts, documentaries

In addition, Editions (numbered issues that group articles together) is a related organising layer — see Editions. Count it as a ninth top-level category if your publication uses it.

You can delete, rename, or reorder any of these sections.

Section configuration

Sections are defined in src/_data/sections.js (an ESM module returning an array):

export default [
  {
    slug: "news",
    label: "News",
    description: "Reporting on stories that matter.",
    color: "#C0392B",
    showOnHomepage: true
  }
];

• slug: the URL segment and the folder name under src/content/.
• label: what readers see in navigation.
• description: feeds the section index meta description and the RSS feed subtitle.
• color: the accent used for section headlines and dividers.
• showOnHomepage: controls whether the section appears in the homepage feed.

Add a new section

See Add a new editorial section for the step-by-step walkthrough. It takes three files: one data entry, one folder, one Markdown file.

Per-section RSS feeds

Every section automatically gets an RSS feed at /{slug}/feed.xml. Readers can subscribe to just the sections they care about rather than the whole publication. The feeds are generated from the same Eleventy collection that powers the section index page.

Assigning an article to a section

In the article's front matter:

section: news

The value must match a section slug from sections.js. The article's file path should also live under src/content/{slug}/ so Project Broadsheet can find it by collection.

What to do next

• Add a new section for a topic that isn't in the defaults.
• Customize the section layout to make one section look different.
• Configure per-section colors.