Make custom page-based loop in Jekyll

Question

I would like to create another page-based loop, in the same way the _posts folder works for the blog section, but for a small catalogue of magazines. (Hopefully that makes sense)

Maybe i'm misunderstanding something simple, but I just can't work it out. I have this loop, which feels like it should work, but nothing gets returned.

{% for page in site.pressitems %}
<li>
    <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
</li>
{% endfor %}

Code, links, explanation, anything is greatly appreciated. :)

Answer 1

You can't add your own collection to site just like that.

site only knows about three collections: pages, posts, and categories. You can get all the posts of a category by doing site.<category>.posts . AFAIK, categories only work for posts, not pages.

This makes sense, since Jekyll is supposed to be mainly a blogging engine, and not a generic static website generator.

So your best solution right now consists on "lying" to jekyll. Make it believe you have posts, when in reality you are making pages.

_posts/
  pressitems/
  blog/

You will be able to loop over the elements inside _posts/pressitems like this:

for item in site.categories.pressitems.posts do
  ... {{ item.title }} ... {{ item.url }}
endfor

Similarly, your "real blog entries" would go this way:

for p in site.categories.blog.posts do
  ... {{ p.title }} ... {{ p.url }}
endfor

The catch is that you will have to respect Jekyll's naming convention regarding filenames; your pressitems have to look like real posts. This means they have to be named starting with a yyyy-mm-dd- string, like posts. Just give them a random date.

_posts/
  pressitems/
    1901-01-01-the-first-press-item.textile
    1902-01-01-the-second-one.textile

EDIT: This was true when this post was originally written, in 2012, but not any more. Modern Jekyll does allow you to create your own collections https://jekyllrb.com/docs/collections/

Answer 2

You can iterate through site.pages

{% for page in site.pages %}
  <h3><a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a></h3>
  <p>{{ page.content }}</p>
{% endfor %}

And limit the list the only pages that use a particular layout.

{% for page in site.pages %}
  {% if page.layout == 'team' %}  
    <h3><a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a></h3>
    <p>{{ page.content }}</p>
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

See this post about generating a sitemap: http://vvv.tobiassjosten.net/jekyll/jekyll-sitemap-without-plugins/

Answer 3

As of October 2016:

In Jekyll 2.5.3 you can actually can add your own collection to site.

Add _my_collection folder to root and fill with documents. Add to _config.yml:

collections:
- my_collection

Now call documents using either post, page, or category. e.g. { for post in site.my_collection < do something > }

It is important to note that this feature can be used it has been marked by the Jekyll team as "an experimental feature and the API may change until the feature stabilizes".

Answer 4

On jekyll you can also add yaml front-matter to pages. There's nothing wrong with adding custom front-matter, like page-category.

---
layout: plain
title: "My beautiful page"
description: ""
snippet: ""
page-category: "category 1"
---

access them via:

{% for page in site.pages %}
   {% if page.page-category == "category 1" %}
        {{ page.content }}
   {% endif %}
{% endfor %}