How-To - Jekyll Collections

Jekyll’s Collections provide powerful tools to organize content. Ben Balter put together an excellent write-up about using Collections with Jekyll. And the Jekyll documentation is super helpful as well.

Here’s what I did, to demonstrate Jekyll Collections:

1. Create the collection folder, <source>/_my_collection_name
2. Create some pages in <source>/_my_collection_name
3. Add the collection config to _config.yml:

    collections:
      my_collection_name:
        output: true
        permalink: /level1/level2/:title.html
   
    defaults:
      - scope:
          path: ""
          type: my_collection_name
        values:
          layout: post
   

4. Create a page, e.g. <source>/allcontent.md, to display all the content in the collection

    ---
    title: All the content in the collection
    layout: post
    permalink: allcontent.html
    ---
   
    {% if site.my_collection_name.size > 0 %}
        <ul>
        {% for a-content in site.my_collection_name %}
            <li>
                <strong><a href="{{ a-content.url }}">{{ a-content.title }}</a></strong> / <time datetime="{{ a-content.date | date_to_xmlschema }}">{{ a-content.date | date: '%b %-d, %Y'}}</time>
                {{ a-content.excerpt }}
            </li>
        {% endfor %}
        </ul>
    {% else %}
        <p>No content in this collection yet!</p>
    {% endif %}