README.md

Jekyll added official support for collections in v2. I recommend you use that instead.

jekyll-page-collections

A Jekyll plugin to manage collections of pages that behave just like posts.

Why would I want other pages just like posts?

Have you ever been building a Jekyll site that you wanted to have chronological listings in addition to the regular posts that you have? Well, that is a perfect case for page collections. They behave just like posts with all of the niceties of posts. You could use it for project listings, team member listings, ideas, or whatever else you want.

Install

Install the page_collections.rb file under your _plugins directory. I prefer to use Git submodules to do this so that you can more easily keep track of where the plugin came from as well as keep it up to date.

cd <jekyll-site-root>
git submodule add [email protected]:jeffkole/jekyll-page-collections.git _plugins/.jekyll-page-collections
cd _plugins
ln -s .jekyll-page-collections/page_collections.rb .
git add page_collections.rb
git commit

Configuration & Files

Add to your configuration a new list called page_collections whose elements are the names of the collections. Each element can be a hash that offers the following configuration options per collection:

• permalink: The permalink style, just like the main configuration option. The default value is the same as the value set for the site configuration. Permalinks are always prepended with the collection name.
• source: The name of the directory where the pages will be found. The default is the name of the collection preceeded with an underscore.

Example:

page_collections:
- projects:
    permalink: pretty
- team
- miscellaneous:
    source: _misc

Usage

Each collection is added to a hash at site.data['page_collections'] where the key is the collection name, as specified in the configuration, and the value is a PageCollection from which you can access name, pages, categories, and tags.

Reference the collections from the site.data['page_collections'] hash like so:

{% for project in site.data['page_collections']['projects'].pages %}
  <h3><a href="{{ project.url }}">{{ project.title }}</a></h3>
{% endfor %}

The categories and tags attributes of a PageCollection hold hashes of category or tag names to lists of pages in the collection, similar to how site holds hashes of categories and tags which key to lists of posts.

page_url Tag

Just like the post_url tag can be used to generate links to posts without having to hard-code them, this plugin registers a page_url tag. The syntax is similar but requires the name of the page collection before the name of the page:

{% page_url projects 2014-03-05-jekyll-page-collections %}

previous and next

Just like a post page has previous and next attributes that point to other posts, page collection pages do too:

{% if page.previous %}
<p>Previous: <a href="{{ page.previous.url }}">{{ page.previous.title }}</a></p>
{% endif %}
{% if page.next %}
<p>Next: <a href="{{ page.next.url }}">{{ page.next.title }}</a></p>
{% endif %}

What's missing?

Pagination. I have not even tested to see if pagination works, but I get the feeling it will not.

Compatibility

jekyll-page-collections has been tested with Jekyll 1.4.3 on Ruby 1.9.3.

Official Jekyll v2 Collections

Jekyll added collections feature in version 2. I would recommend using them instead of this plugin. If you are upgrading, the transition is easy:

1. Change page_collections to collections in _config.yml
2. Add output: true to each collection's configuration in _config.yml
3. Reference site['collection-name'] instead of site.data['page_collections']['collection-name']
4. Hope that someone implements a {% collection_url %} tag and pagination