Frontmatter automation and category sorting in Jekyll

Question

I am new to Jekyll, and I am working on a site where I want to have a navigation menu that uses the category names as the link text. However, I don't want the cat names ordered alphabetically or reversed, but in a different order. The only thing I could come up with is, defining a hash in the config file like this:

cats:
  "a": "dogs"
  "b": "cats"
  "c": "spiders"
  "d": "jiraffes"

and then for the navigation I have something like this (please don't laugh at this noobie, he he):

<ul>{% for cat_hash in site.cats %}{% for cat in cat_hash %}{% for page in site.pages %}{% if cat[1] == page.category %}
    <li><a href="{{ page.url | prepend: site.baseurl }}">{{ page.category }}</a></li>{% endif %}{% endfor %}{% endfor %}{% endfor %}
</ul>

Now, since I have many pages under each category, I would like to automate the process a bit, so I'm trying to use liquid code in the front matter like this:

---
layout: default
category: {{ site.cats["a"] }}
---

but of course this doesn't work. I've searched SO and found a solution using a plugin, but I can not use plugins for this site. Anybody has any idea? What I would like to do is:

Have the categories sorted in any order I want, (not alphabetically).
Automate the cat name generation in the front matter

Thank you in advance.

I've been trying to do that too, with no luck. Sometimes Jekyll is so manual and limited. Gonna keep checking this question out. — Xirux Nefer

David Jacquel David Jacquel · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-01T21:18:50

A possible solution :

Ordering is not the problem and I think that the _config.yml seems to do it.

The problem is to automatically match a page to a category without having to write the category name in the pages's front matter.

My idea is then to match a category to a folder. Any file present in the cats folder will be considered to be part of the cats category, and then appear in the right menu.

--cats
  |--cat1.md
  |--cat2.md
  |--
--dogs
  |--dog1.md
  |--dog2.md
  |--
--spiders
  |--spider1.md

Then the _config.yml can be changed a little to give a match between folder name and display in the menu.

categories:
    dogs:
        display: Doggies
    cats:
        display: I love catz
    spiders:
        display: Spiders

Now we can easily match our pages to a category and display everything in a menu :

{% for cat in site.categories %}
  <h2>{{ cat[1].display }}</h2>
  <ul>
  {% for page in site.pages %}
    {% if page.dir contains cat[0] %}
      <li><a href="{{ page.url | prepend: site.baseurl }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li></li>
    {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>
{% endfor %}

Et voilà !

Frontmatter automation and category sorting in Jekyll

1 Answers