How to paginate posts by author

Question

What I'm trying to do

We know Jekyll can use front matter variables like tags and categories and access them with site.tags and site.categories to iterate over them using liquid. Now my problem is that I can't do this with a custom front matter variable like author (as in site.authors) because Jekyll will not store it in a list format. This makes it very hard to paginate it.

The problem

Every solution I have looked at i.e.

• how to handle multiple authors in Jekyll

• adding authors to Jekyll

• jekyll-author

requires me to hardcode a list of authors to _config.yml or some other .yml (i.e. in _data/authors.yml). The problem here is that I don't use a fixed list of authors. The authors list needs to get updated when I throw in another post with a front-matter tag author: exampleAuthor or a list of authors (as in multiple authors per post, as currently only possible with categories and tags as well), while the server is running. It works with tags and categories splendidly, but not with custom tags like authors.

The easiest solution would be having a site.authors list to iterate over and just extending it with a ruby plugin.

I haven't found a plugin that provides me with a solution and thinking this was a common problem that I'm probably not the first to have.

What I tried

I then looked at writing my own ruby plugin (Which is hard on it's own because of the lack of documentation. Maybe I'm to dumb to google, but the resources I found where very limited and hardly enough to guide you through the process) but there has to be a reason why this is so hard to do that makes all the existing solutions require hard coding the author list in a .yml (or .json, but most people go with .yml for some reason).

Doing this is out of the question for me, since I want to only throw in posts with author names in it later on and manipulating a .yml (I am under the impression that ymlfiles don't get compiled once the server is started, like _config.yml, correct me if I'm wrong) would be counterproductive because it requires you to restart the server to have them compiled.

Even very advanced plugins like jekyll-paginate-v2 (which I use successfully to paginate posts by tags and categories) don't have a solution to this as this issue portrays. He's getting recommended to abuse the category variable to paginate by author, which is kind of a desperate workaround.

I have found suggestions that it can be done with collections, however it does not seem feasible. Primarily due to the nature of their implementation: They require hard-coding the author list (again, I don't want that. I don't have a fixed list of authors. All of the author information has to come from the front-matter in the /_posts directory .md files) As of now I don't see how it can be done with collections. However I'm open to suggestions.

Edit: I found this dated issue on Jekylls github page which highlights that people are trying to do the same but to no avail. Has this become viable in the last 4 years?

Answer 1

Adding authors to Jekyll posts is easy with collections. Here's a proof of concept for you. Specifically, in this commit I add everything you need for it.

As for your question about pagination, will need to use a pagination plugin (paginate-v2 is good), as I believe the built in pagination only supports the posts collection.