Creating Jekyll Collections

So far with this personal site, I have stuck to the bog-standard way of putting all blog post content into markdown files in the “posts” folder and let jekyll process them into a (hopefully) coherent site with urls and folders based on dates.

Jekyll Collections

Recently I discovered that jekyll supports a concept called collections and the posts folder is just a default collection. You can declare other collections in your site .yml file and have jekyll process these more folders in the same way as the post folder.

I used this in the Makers n Creators sub site I set up to collect content and code examples for our recent week of events at Campus North. I wanted to have a web-based presentation for each day of the event, generated from a set of dated markdown files and delivered by webslides.tv, so a folder per day seemed like the best way to segregate each day’s content.

YYMV (Your Yaml Might Vary)

Each day of the week for our event had a particular theme so I created a set of collections in the .yml file to reflect those themes:

Declaring these collections in the .yml means we now have access to them in our liquid templates as sub-objects of “site”.

Presentation

For my presentations, I created a webslides layout like this:

Each single page presentation, for example the micro:bit page, could be written to pull all the content from the microbits collection, separated from all the other content on the site. Like this:

Now we can create a folder for each named collection, remembering to prefix each one with an underscore like the posts folder. Content for each collection can be added to a folder with the usual dating and front matter rules applying as you would expect.