Description in _site.yaml causing Error "STRING_ELT() can only be applied to a 'character vector', not a 'list'" about distill HOT 1 CLOSED

Thanks a lot for opening the issue. I think we were mysteriously missing a edge case. Thanks a lot for the github repo as example, it was quite useful to fix !

First, let me explain what happened with your repo.

The error you encounter is a XML creation issue. We had a similar one in #448 and this oriented my search to usage of description field inside files.

For the context, a RSS feed is created with XML for listings (https://rstudio.github.io/distill/blog.html#rss-feed) and the condition to trigger this is description and site_url inside_site.yml. This why you "solved" your issue by removing description field in your config file - it opt-out RSS feed for listings by doing that. But the real issue is not there.

Knowing it would be something related to listing and description, I targeted this in my debug. By trying to render your website in debug mode with distill, I found that the file creating the issue is OMbook_glossary.Rmd. As you can see this file as no description field. And this is the real issue. If you add a description to this post, then it will work.

Though, distill should have handle that as when no description is provided, the title should be used. But for an unknown reason, it seems this has never worked because there was a R to -> JSON -> R conversion happening, and NULL was transformed to list() and we tried to write this empty list to XML. Anyhow, I have a fix that I will push.

Regarding why this happen recently, maybe this is because, from commit history, you tinkered with collection and categories. This triggered the listing feature that was not present before.

Anyhow, no description field should not have been an issue for distill, and thanks to you it means there was more to #448 report.

thank you !

from distill.