taxonomy: support additional custom grouping

[postb99]

Hello Sören,

Just thinking over these days, why not a new idea to start a new year? Wishing you a bright 2026!

Children pages custom layout has yet become a strength for user adoption of the theme (why isn't this feature highlighted more in theme's documentation menu? I wonder about Hugo or the theme in term of standards), so I thought about the following use cases.

1. Regular child pages, using grouping, but instead of grouping by title's first letter, allow to optionally group by something else, date, month, author... A custom field of user's choice. Could this be interesting? The idea there is that grouping means visual highlight.
2. My concern, children pages given by taxonomy... This has more sense in this case because one cannot logically group children and grandchildren. The use cases on my poetrey site would be:

• With "Months"/"les mois" tag, meaning poems here and there that refer a specific month in their content, I could have such a display: grouping by month, while every poem's description is custom and freely highlights target month's adjectives. So there would be a frontmatter field dedicated to grouping (which key?) and with similar value for grouping.
• The second use case: looking at this page that is now manually built: https://poesieland.github.io/thoughts/jours_symboliques/index.html similar use case thaty previous one: there would be a new "Symbolic days" tag, with description being the wording of the day, allowing to group poems.

What do you think of my suggestion?

[McShelby]

I also was thinking about custom group predicates instead of always using the title but discarded this for now. The difficulty is to communicate to the reader how a list grouped and sorted.

Currently the group heading contains just the first letter of all contained titles while each item has its complete title listed first. This is (at least in my eyes) pretty obvious to read.

If we now group - say - by date, what should the group heading contain? Years? Months? Dates? Datetimes? So it seems it needs to be configurable. Other complexity will arise if grouped by other attributes (maybe other taxonomies in your example?).

While I think it is possible, the effort exceeds my available time. Also, I expect the code to become complex and hard to maintain (for my standards ;-) ) with not much gain to the average user.

I may be tempted to think about this again, if enough other users are requesting such a feature.

[postb99]

After thinking it over, two choices:

1. The most probable one: close this...
   Because the taxonomy-related use case is an edge case too much. This is my problem because I already have structured content with unlimited depth by design but would like some tags to behave a bit like a two-level structure, for tagged content list browsing.

For regular content, the extended complicated use case I thought of is overcomplicated and can be achieved by structuring content with more nested levels, that's totally covered by current children type option.

Taxonomy is meant to be basically single-level.

2. Implement something basic, an optional field that would be used as group heading value.

Feel free to close.