Deprecate and then rename/remove Page.URL

[bep]

I cannot think of one valid use case for it, and I see it used in the wild all the time when RelPermalik or Permalink is the correct choice.

URL returns the front matter value for regular pages, if set, else it return the RelPermalink.

[onedrawingperday]

I am not in favor of removing Page.URL.

For example
if eq .URL "/some-url/" provides an easy way to add an active class to page links that live outside Hugo's menu configuration (for various reasons) Also this is handy in cases where it's difficult to do a .Permalink or .RelPermalink check, like in Nested Sections list pages.

But if you really think these are not valid use cases. Go ahead and remove it. I'll look into what can be done to replace its functionality... like I always do...

[Jos512]

.URL and .Permalink are indeed much the same, although the first returns a string value and the second a template.HTML value. So even though they return the same data, they behave differently:

{{ if in .URL "hugo" }}
...
{{ end }}

{{ if in (.Permalink | string) "hugo" }}
...
{{ end }}

I agree there's some redundancy. And on one hand I think Hugo template code might become easier when there's no two variables that return the same data. But on the other hand the required conversion to string of .Permalink might be more odd to newcomers than two variables are.

That latter might also make explaining how people can update from .URL to .Permalink somewhat confusing. Assuming we use a terminal message for this like Hugo did with previous depreciations. Would a terminal message like this be something people with little knowledge of Go/Hugo understand?

WARN: .URL has been deprecated. Replace .URL with 
.Permalink, but when comparing .Permalink against a 
string, first translate .Permalink to a string value
with the 'string' function.

Even though I wrote this without using programming lingo (like 'casting' or 'type incompatibility'), I still doubt if this is clear enough. (Or should we assume people read the release notes, where this can be explained more fully?)

So to summarise: I don't know what wisdom is for this issue. 😆

[onedrawingperday]

Or should we assume people read the release notes, where this can be explained more fully?

If the recent release of Hugo 0.32 is any indication I would say that people don't bother with the release notes. The forum is full of posts regarding index.md

A Warn like @Jos512 proposes is the way to go.

And possibly an example of the .Permalink translation to a string value, in the Release notes.

You cannot assume that every user of Hugo has used every one of its functions or that he/she knows what to do in advance. Not all of us are from a Dev background.

[onedrawingperday]

@bep

Please consider removing .Page.URL in the next Hugo release. I think that it's about time.

There are out-of-date themes and perhaps tutorials floating around and some users keep on encountering the .Page.URL deprecation notice and having questions about it, as shown here.

It's better to break some old projects rather than wasting time explaining a deprecation message that was added in 2017, five years later, in 2022.

[bep]

@onedrawingperday hmm... I was sure I removed that in the previous release. O well, thanks for the heads up.

EDIT: OK, I see I bump the WARNING level to ERROR ... Yes, I will remove.

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