End-to-end navigation

A training roadmap is meant to be walked from the very first lesson of the first section to the last lesson of the final section, without the learner having to think about section boundaries. This doc explains how the theme builds that continuous end-to-end navigation and what you must do as an author to make it flow correctly.

The theme gathers every post that shares the roadmap's track tag as its primary tag and carries #training-content, then orders them by published date, ascending. That single ordered list is the roadmap's spine. Previous/next links at the foot of each lesson step through this list, so "next" at the end of section 1's last lesson leads straight into section 2's first lesson — the section boundary is invisible to the reader.

Ordering that produces correct end-to-end flow:
  Track post              2026-03-03T09:00   (leads)
  S1 lesson 1             2026-03-03T09:10
  S1 lesson 2             2026-03-03T09:20
  S1 lesson 3             2026-03-03T09:30
  S2 lesson 1             2026-03-03T09:40   <- "next" flows across the boundary
  S2 lesson 2             2026-03-03T09:50
  ...spaced 10 min apart, sections consecutive...

The implication for authoring is critical: publish dates must increase monotonically across the whole roadmap, in true end-to-end order — all of section 1's lessons before any of section 2's, and so on. If a section-2 lesson accidentally has an earlier date than a section-1 lesson, it will jump out of place in both the curriculum and the prev/next flow. Spacing lessons a fixed interval apart (ten minutes is the site convention) keeps ordering unambiguous and leaves room to insert lessons later.

The section tags do not affect this linear order — they only group lessons visually into sections in the curriculum sidebar. Order is purely by date. So the two authoring rules are: make the track tag each lesson's primary tag, and set spaced, strictly increasing publish dates in end-to-end sequence.

Do those two things and the curriculum, the section grouping, and the continuous prev/next navigation all assemble themselves. This completes the training-roadmap authoring guide; the next section covers site-wide configuration like routing and navigation.