Chapter templates, or not?

[JimMadge]

We have a set of chapter templates in the book repository. These set out some structure for a chapter, maybe most importantly a landing page with summary and prerequisites, and a resources (conclusion?) page with recommendations for next reading.

Contributors are advised to use these in the community handbook.

This structure is used inconsistently in the book, and probably applies only to the guides, and not the foreword, afterword, community handbook, pathways.

We could,

1. Abandon this format
2. Work to enforce it

If we go with 2,

• I like the prerequisites and further reading ideas (although, I feel like "resources" isn't a good name for this).
• I think we should implement this using a plugin or plugins, and not require people to maintain multiple instance of this Markdown structure (Don't repeat yourself!).
  Hopefully we can take this information from page metadata, otherwise we can create directives.
• If we have plugins, the template files for the landing page and further reading page won't be needed.
  Instead we can document in the book how to fill out the metadata or use directives.
• The other templates feel less useful and more like suggested structure. I think they can be removed.

[Arielle-Bennett]

Weighing in - I'm in favour of enforcing a chapter template.

It is helpful to have consistency for the structure of the book, but it's been a bit harder to enforce if people are not copying the template from GitHub and then the structure is also not enforced at review (it's me, hi, I'm the problem it's meeeee).

So if it's straightforward to implement I say go for it!

[JimMadge]

If we go with a directive, it could end up looking like,

---
title: Chapter title
prerequisites: [chapter1, chapter2]
read_next: [chaptera, chapterb]
summary: A summary of this chapter.
motivation: What you will learn.
---

:::{chapter-landing}
:::

Or the same but with the keyword arguments in the directive rather than in the page frontmatter.