Hidden Pages

A hidden page is built and reachable by URL, but is left out of everywhere a reader would otherwise stumble across it.

What "hidden" means

Hidden pages also carry a noindex robots tag, so a search engine that encounters the URL will not list it.

Useful for drafts, unlisted references, and pages you want to link to directly without putting them in the navigation.

Hiding a page

Add hidden: true to its frontmatter:

---
title: Draft Notes
description: Not ready yet
hidden: true
---

# Draft Notes

That is all. This is how this site's own hidden page is marked.

Or from navigation

If you maintain a manual navigation array, an entry can be hidden there instead:

navigation: [{ name: 'Draft Notes', path: 'notes/draft', hidden: true }];

Hiding a section hides everything beneath it:

{
  name: 'Internal',
  hidden: true,
  children: [
    { name: 'Runbook', path: 'internal/runbook' },   // also hidden
    { name: 'Oncall',  path: 'internal/oncall' },    // also hidden
  ],
}

Both mechanisms are honoured, so a page hidden either way is hidden everywhere.

Finding the URL

npm run show-urls

🔒 [HIDDEN] Secret Demo Page
   source → content/secret-demo.md
   url    → https://eziwiki.dev/secret-demo

Hidden is not private

A hidden page is a public file in your static export. Anyone with the URL can read it, and nothing prevents it being shared. Using hashed URLs makes the address unguessable, which is obscurity, not access control.

If content must not be read by the wrong person, do not publish it. Keep it out of content/, or put the whole site behind authentication at the host.

Excluding a page entirely

To keep a file in the repository but out of the build altogether, prefix its name or its folder with _:

content/
├── _drafts/          ← never built
│   └── half-done.md
└── published.md

Files and folders starting with _ or . are skipped by the content scanner, so they produce no page at all.

Use _ for work that should not exist yet, and hidden: true for work that should exist but not be advertised.

Next

• URL Strategies — readable versus opaque URLs
• Navigation Configuration — how the sidebar is built