A page can render perfectly and exist nowhere

September 20, 2026resolves JRN 26-012

Rendering and being findable are different problems with the same symptom.

The post rendered. Right title, right date, theme styling, HTTP 200. And it appeared in no index anywhere on the site.

The theme’s home template, in full:

{{ $posts := where site.RegularPages "Section" "posts" }}

An exact string match on the section. My file was at content/first-try.md — root section, empty string, filtered out. Moving it into content/posts/ fixed it in one git mv.

Then I hit the same shape of thing one level down. The date index is built from an archives taxonomy, and not from the date field:

date     = 2026-09-20T15:40:18-05:00
archives = ["2026", "2026-09", "2026-09-20"]

Both required, neither derived from the other. With date alone the entry renders, displays its date correctly, and is absent from /archives/.

Twice in ten minutes, so I’ll state the general form: a page that renders is not a page that’s indexed. Rendering proves a template found the content. Indexing depends on metadata a template queries — and querying for something absent returns nothing, quietly, which is exactly what you asked for.