about jekyll-archives

what i learned

there's a jekyll-plugin named jekyll-archives that lets you create archives of your posts based on metadata/front matter.

i used it for socialtech.us to create a category/${category} page for each of the categories in the site (created dynamically).

how i learned

the social tech collaborative website has a /categories/ page where each category has a header so you can get to each category via url like socialtech.us/categories#${category}. for example, you could go to socialtech.us/categories#texting if you wanted to see the plays with the tag texting. however, because each play can have multiple categories, plays would appear multiple times in the /categories page. we wanted a page per category.

at first i thought i was going to have to some wild logic in a page to "fill" in each category and maybe use the page's query params but that would not be done through jekyll since jekyll creates the static website only - you can't use jekyll or liquid tags to play around with the query params.

the answer was found here: github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/5672

all that was needed was

1. to add jekyll-archives to the list of plug-ins 2.

# Archives
jekyll-archives:
  enabled: ['categories']
  layout: archive
  permalinks:
    category: '/category/:name/'

1. add an archive.html to _layouts/

visit

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-archives