Feature or Documentation Request: Individual table as home page template

[mroswell]

It would be great to have a sample showing how to move a single database that has a single table, to the index page. I'm trying it now, and find there is a real depth of Datasette and Python understanding that's required to be successful.

I've got all the basic jinja concepts down... variables, template control structures, template inheritance, template overrides, css, html, the --template-dir and --static arguments, etc.

But copying the table.html file to index.html doesn't work. There are undocumented functions and filters... I can figure some of them out (yay, url_builder.py and utils/init.py!) but it's a slog better handled by a much stronger Python developer.

One sample would make a world of difference. The ideal form of this documentation would be a diff between the default table.html and how that would look if essentially moved to index.html. The use case is for everyone who wants to create a public-facing website to explore a single table at the root directory. (Maybe a second bit of documentation for people who have a single database with multiple tables.)

(Hmm... might be cool to have a setting for that, where it happens automagically! If only one table, then home page is at the table level. if only one database, then home page is at the database level.... as an option.)

I suppose I could ignore this, and somehow do this in the DNS settings once I hook up Vercel to a domain name, maybe.. and remove the breadcrumbs in table.html... but for now, a documentation request in the form of a diff... for viewing a single table (or a single database) at the root.

(Actually, there's probably room for a whole expanded section on templates. Noticed some nice table metadata in one of the datasette examples, for instance... Hmm... maybe a whole library of solutions in one place... maybe a documentation hackathon! If that's of interest, of course it's a separate issue. )

[simonw]

You're right, doing this is really hard at the moment - I'm not sure I know how I would tackle this either, and it's something I've wanted in the past!

I'll have a think about this one.

[mroswell]

Maybe the addition of two template files: 'one_database_index.html' and 'one_table_index.html' would be a better idea than the documentation diff idea. (They could include commented instructions to rename the preferred template 'index.html', along with any other necessary guidance.)

[mroswell]

I very much want to make:
https://list.SaferDisinfectants.org/disinfectants/listN
have this URL:
https://list.SaferDisinfectants.org/

I'm using only one table page on the site, with no pagination. I'm not using the home page, though when I tried to move my table to the home page as mentioned above, I failed to figure out how.

I am using cloudflare, but I haven't figured out a forwarding or HTML re-write method of doing this, either.

Is there any way I can get a prettier list URL? I'm on Vercel.

(I have a wordpress site on the main domain on a separate host.)

[fgregg]

i'm going to take a swing at this today. we'll see.