Navigation & footer

moss auto-generates your site's header navigation and footer from page frontmatter. You don't configure a menu file — you mark pages with nav: or footer: and moss assembles the chrome.

Header nav#

Which pages appear in the header bar depends on your site's shape:

• Organized sites (at least one subfolder under the project root): every root-level non-index page auto-appears in the nav.
• Flat sites (no subfolders): only pages whose filename is a recognized "nav keyword" — about, 关于, or 關於 — auto-appear.

In either mode, explicit frontmatter always wins:

Sort order: pages with a weight value come first, lowest → highest. Pages without weight follow, sorted alphabetically by title.

---
title: Services
nav: true
weight: 10
---

Breadcrumb#

When a page has no nav items around it (e.g., an article deep inside a section), moss auto-shows a breadcrumb trail in place of the site name — so visitors can find their way back up the tree.

Force it on or off per page with breadcrumb: true / breadcrumb: false in frontmatter, or cascade it to a whole folder:

# posts/index.md
---
title: Posts
cascade:
  breadcrumb: true
---

Footer#

Pages with footer: true in frontmatter appear as links in the site footer.

# privacy.md
---
title: Privacy
footer: true
---

Footer alignment#

By default footer links sit on the left. Use footer_align: right to pull a page to the right column — typical for "Imprint", "Colophon", or legal links:

# colophon.md
---
title: Colophon
footer: true
footer_align: right
---

moss also auto-adds an RSS feed link to the left footer when your site emits a feed.

Footer slot#

For custom content at the end of the right footer column, plugins and themes can emit HTML into the footer-right slot — useful for copyright lines, Creative Commons badges, or small legal text.

Language-scoped navigation#

Nav items are scoped to the current page's language tree automatically. On a multilingual site, the header nav shows only pages in the current page's language — visitors on the English homepage see the English nav; visitors on the Chinese homepage see the Chinese nav. The language toggle (separate icon in the header) lets them switch trees.

If nav: true is set on a page in one language tree, the corresponding page in another tree needs its own nav: true — nav is per-page, not global.

Related pages#

• frontmatter — nav, weight, footer, footer_align, breadcrumb field reference
• ../multilingual — language trees and how nav scopes to them
• ../structure — how root-level vs nested pages are determined