Slides Collection

The slides collection type turns a folder of Markdown files into slide decks with a card gallery. Directories named slides, presentations, or decks are auto-detected.

content/
  slides/
    intro-to-go.md
    testing-basics.md
    design-patterns.md

This produces:

/slides/ renders a deck gallery with cards showing thumbnails, titles, descriptions, slide counts, dates, and tags
/slides/intro-to-go/ renders the deck as a full-screen presentation (automatic, no frontmatter needed)

Auto-detection

Sarde infers the slides collection type from directory names:

Directory names	Sort	Layout	Feed
`slides`, `presentations`, `decks`	date (newest first)	default (gallery)	no

No sarde.yaml configuration is required. The gallery page keeps normal site chrome (header, footer). Deck pages default to the presentation layout automatically.

Deck frontmatter

Decks use standard frontmatter fields. A few additional params control slide-specific behavior:

---
title: "Introduction to Algorithms"
description: "Sorting, searching, and complexity analysis."
date: 2026-03-10
image: /images/decks/algorithms.png
tags: [algorithms, beginner]
params:
  slide_count: 24
  slide_breakers: "hr, h2"
---

Field	Type	Default	Description
`image`	String	(none)	Gallery card thumbnail. Decks without an image get a styled gradient placeholder.
`params.slide_count`	Number	(auto)	Override the auto-computed slide count badge.
`params.slide_breakers`	String	`"hr"`	CSS selector list of elements that start a new slide.

Multiple courses

Group decks into courses using subdirectories:

content/
  slides/
    _index.md
    standalone-deck.md
    web-dev/
      _index.md
      lecture-1.md
      lecture-2.md
    algorithms/
      _index.md
      lecture-1.md

The root gallery at /slides/ shows one card per course (with a deck count) plus any decks at the root level. Each course page (/slides/web-dev/) shows its own deck gallery.

Course _index.md files define the course title and description:

---
title: Web Development
description: "Building web applications with Go."
---

Gallery customization

Override the gallery template by placing a file at layouts/_slides/list.html or layouts/slides/list.html. The underscore-prefixed path follows the same convention as _default and _docs in the template lookup chain: it applies to every collection detected as a slides collection. The non-prefixed path is collection-specific and applies only to the collection named slides, taking precedence over the underscore-prefixed override when both exist. See Template overlay resolution for the full lookup order. The default template renders:

Course cards: title, description, deck count
Deck cards: thumbnail (or gradient placeholder), title, description, slide count badge, date, tags, author pills

Overriding collection defaults

Override auto-detected defaults in sarde.yaml:

collections:
  slides:
    sort: "title asc"
    paginate: 12

See Content and Collections for the full override reference.