HTML: Is it possible to add a date with "last-modified" field in the sidebar?

[pglpm]

Description

I am happily using Quarto for the site/lectures of a course, in HTML. The material is often updated, so I'd like to include a "Last modified: ..." in the sidebar (the bar typically on the left), just below the title.

I could do this by hand, by adding that line to the title, for instance like this:

sidebar:
    title: "Course Title<br> Last modified: 2023-08-31"

but this would require to manually change the date every time some page is modified.

I was wondering if there's any way to make this more automatic. I tried:

• adding a date: last-modified under sidebar:, but no date appears at all
• adding last-modified to the title:, outside the title string, but this yields an error.

Thank you!

[mcanouil]

Use the meta shortcode: title: "Course Title<br> Last modified: {{< meta date >}}".

[pglpm]

Ah maybe I have to do that under html: rather than under book:. Will try now.

[mcanouil]

I don't know your whole setup but the following works just fine:

quarto create project website mywebsite

Then modify _quarto.yml:

project:
  type: website

website:
  title: "Mywebsite"
  sidebar:
    title: "{{< meta date >}}"
    left:
      - href: index.qmd
        text: Home
      - about.qmd

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    css: styles.css
    toc: true


date: last-modified

PS: when asking questions or reporting issues, providing context is in 99 % of cases an absolute requirements, otherwise it's just back and forth while making/invalidating assumptions.
Providing a reproducible example as a plain text document in the post (not attached) or a Git repository help ensure your question/context is understood.

[pglpm]

True, sorry about that. I think my problem is that I'm using a book project. I'll prepare a minimal but complete example and update my question.

[mcanouil]

Even in a book project, it works.

[pglpm]

I was wrongly putting date: within book:. moving it outside solved the problem – thank you so much!

[danmackinlay]

For future visitors to this q: from inspecting the templates I note that recent quarto already supports a date-modified field, which already probably odes what the OP wants.

[mcanouil]

Not in the sidebar ...