Note: this was tested in Nanoc 3.6.1

I’ve seen a few questions (and a few incorrect answers) about how to get next and previous links for a given item in Nanoc. If you are using the blogging module in Nanoc you can access all your articles in sorted order by descending creation date. Using this we can create a quick helper for next and previous links.

Add the following to your helpers, usually lib/default.rb or lib/helpers.rb:

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def previous_link
  prev = sorted_articles.index(@item) + 1
  prev_article = sorted_articles[prev]
  if prev_article.nil?
    ''
  else
    title = prev_article[:title]
    html = "← Previous"
    link_to(html, prev_article.reps[0], :class => "previous", :title => title)
  end
end

def next_link
  nxt = sorted_articles.index(@item) - 1
  if nxt < 0
    ''
  else
    post = sorted_articles[nxt]
    title = post[:title]
    html = "Next &rarr;"
    link_to(html, post.reps[0], :class => "next", :title => title)
  end
end

It’s important to note that sorted_articles returns an array where sorted_articles[0] is the newest article. So if you want to get the next (newer) article you want to decrement the current index.

Once you have this in a helper module, you can use it in your layout with previous_link. My post layout is in Haml so it looks like:

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%article.post
  = yield

  %p.prev
    = previous_link
  %p.next
    = next_link

I use this on this blog, and you can check out the full source on github.