Why _SAVE_AS and _URL?

[Dreamsorcerer]

I'm confused by the presence of both _SAVE_AS and _URL variables.

It seems to me that whatever you set a _SAVE_AS variable to, the _URL must then be set to exactly the same thing or (and only if it ended with index.html), the same thing with index.html stripped.

This seems like it's easy to misconfigure and mess up (e.g. #1188), while not providing any benefits I can see...

If there are at most 2 valid values for _URL variables, why not just have a bool, such as PREFER_SLASH_URLS or STRIP_INDEX_FROM_URLS? This could then be applied generally across the project without needing to configure a dozen different variables.

e.g. Everytime a URL is output, the code could just do:

if PREFER_SLASH_URLS:
    prefix, _, filename = url.rpartition("/")
    if filename.startswith("index."):
        url = prefix + "/"

I'm wondering if there's some other use case I'm missing here?

[minchinweb]

One example: If you create a page and if you set x_SAVE_AS = None and x_URL = "https://getpelican.com/", then the page won't be saved to disk, but will exist within Pelican during site generation, and thus be included in your list of pages (i.e. for navigation, depending on your template); the navigation link now goes to the Pelican site instead of an internal page.

(You would probably do this by setting the page metadata rather than using the settings in your pelicanconf.py file, but hopefully the example is still useful.)

[Dreamsorcerer]

I suppose a more realistic scenario could be to have AUTHOR_URL point to Github or similar (although this is still very limited, e.g. it wouldn't allow linking to different home pages for each author), at the cost of losing the listing of user's posts.

Maybe a better option would be to have _URL variables default to None. Then when set to None, they would just use the value from _SAVE_AS? PREFER_SLASH_URLS can then be added for the common case of stripping index.html and the _URL variables can be deprioritised in the docs as they would be unneeded for 99+% of users.