Frontmatter - Accent CMS

Every markdown file starts with YAML frontmatter:

---
title: Page Title
date: 2025-01-01
author: Your Name
lead: A short description for listings and previews.
tags:
  - tag1
  - tag2
menu:
  visible: true
  order: 1
template: default
---

Available Fields

Field	Description	Required
`title`	Page title	Yes
`date`	Publication date	No
`author`	Author name	No
`lead`	Short excerpt for listings	No
`tags`	List of tags	No
`menu.visible`	Show in navigation	No
`menu.order`	Sort order in menu	No
`template`	Template to use	No
`process.markdown`	Enable/disable markdown rendering (default: `true`)	No

The process.markdown field is covered in detail under Processing Control.

Using Lead in Templates

The lead field provides a short description that appears in page listings (like the Docs or Blog index). Use it in templates:

{% for p in all_pages %}
  <h3><a href="{{ p.url }}">{{ p.title }}</a></h3>
  {% if p.lead %}<p class="lead">{{ p.lead }}</p>{% endif %}
  {% if p.date %}<time>{{ p.date }}</time>{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Leave lead out and Accent CMS derives one from the page’s first paragraph, so a listing always has something to show.

If you have written a description, that is used instead of the derived excerpt – you do not have to write the same sentence twice. The order is lead, then description, then the first paragraph. A lead you wrote always wins; only the derived excerpt gives way.

This applies everywhere the lead is published, not just to listings: your theme renders it wherever it uses page.lead, and it becomes the page’s RSS item description and its search snippet as well. So on a page that has a description and no lead, adding one changes what readers see on the page itself – which is usually what you want, and worth knowing before you add description to a page whose derived lead you were happy with.

Either way the lead is published as plain text: raw HTML is stripped from it, because it also becomes the page’s <meta name="description">, its social-card description, its RSS item description and its llms.txt entry, none of which can render markup. Your file keeps whatever you wrote – only the published view is stripped – and a tag inside `backticks` survives, so you can still write a lead about <section>.