New Pelican capability to have hidden posts.
Thu 20 August 2026
I found that in the Bridge website I created, I have some weekly blog-type articles about Rockstar (Modern American Bridge), and I'm still writing up basic information about the conventions. I don't want the intro and overview article in the main feed (but they should still appear in the categories). Preferably, I can force the intro to the convention as the first element in a listed category.
While I'm in the codebase, I'm also going to read in the gallery: tag as an array instead of a string. This will support looking in multiple directories for webphotos and is a minimal change. The field is read, and then I split the string on a space delimiter. A single field will duck-type to a single-element array, so I can just change the processor to iterate over the array.
To make a hidden article appear in a specific category list while remaining hidden from your main index and navigation menus, you cannot use the core Status: hidden attribute alone because Pelican explicitly strips hidden posts from category indexes.
Instead, I'm going to add a custom metadata field and an update to the Jinja2 template to trigger on the new field.
In the Markdown files, instead of setting Status: hidden, set the new Hidden: field to true. No custom tag will default to false.
In the template's index.html and archives.html, the main renderer loop will now have condition code to check the Hidden value.
{% for article in articles_page.object_list %}
{# Only show the article if 'hidden' metadata is NOT true #}
{% if not article.hidden == 'true' %}
<h2><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}">{{ article.title }}</a></h2>
<p>{{ article.summary }}</p>
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
This keeps the article from appearing in the regular index; the category (category.html) view will behave normally.
One final note: Pelican does support a field 'Feed: false' that prevents an article from appearing in ATOM/RSS feeds. The above code could have triggered (doubled up) on the meaning of the Feed instead of adding a new custom field, but that approach confuses the meaning of the field.
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A gallery for Pelican