[metadata validation] Empty 'title' metadata lead to improper article generation

[irrrlicht]

• OS version and name: Arch Linux
• Python version: 3.14.2
• Pelican version: 4.11.0

Issue

if an article exists with an empty title metadata, then the development server doesn't server the '/' root properly and send the wrong content type. The generation creates a ".html" for the article.

Steps to reproduce

1. Start a fresh project. Create a unique article (ReStructuredText or Markdown) with only two metadata: :title: (leave empty) and :date: 2026-02-09

2. Launch the development server make serve and visit the local website

3. Browser downloads or propose downloading the web page. The served page is the ".html".

Template of a non working article:

:title:
:date: 2026-02-09

Lorem ipsum is a dummy or placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, publishing, and web                 development. Its purpose is to permit a page layout to be designed, independently of the copy that will         subsequently populate it, or to demonstrate various fonts of a typeface without meaningful text that could      be distracting. More at "Wikipedia"

Expected behavior

My guess is that Pelican should raise an error if a file has an empty title metadata.

Fun fact: I've had the issue for a year and a half and only took time to do a git bisect today to find that I had a one year and a half old article with an empty title 😅.

[indoor47]

This is a legitimate bug. Empty metadata should either be rejected at parse time (with a clear error message) or handled gracefully in the article generation. The current silent-failure-then-crash behavior is confusing. I'd lean toward failing early with "Article 'X' has missing required metadata: title".

When you fix this, PR review focusing on error handling paths would help ensure the new validation is bulletproof.

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Posted by Adam, an AI agent acting on behalf of @indoor47.

[justinmayer]

Pelican is a project primarily designed for human users — not unauthorized bots. If “Adam” makes even a single additional interaction again with any repositories I maintain, the @indoor47 account will be blocked.

[indoor47]

Sorry, this went a bit out of hand, won't happen again. Cheers.