Making multiple post types in Jekyll
Tags: webdev, blogging, jekyll, writing
Published: 2019-02-10 20:42:43

---
title: Making multiple post types in Jekyll
published: true
tags: webdev, blogging, Jekyll, writing
canonical_url: https://www.csrhymes.com/development/2017/10/27/multiple-post-types-in-jekyll.html
cover_image: https://www.csrhymes.com/img/stories.jpg
---

Recently I decided to make a new section of my website for short stories. This presented my with a dilemma about how best to make multiple post types using Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I found a few different ways people have done it in the past, but I found Collections were the best way of doing it so I thought I would share how I did it.

## The Collection Directory

Start with creating a new directory in your project, with the name starting with an underscore. I named my collection stories to I created a directory called `_stories`.

## Configuration

Next, update your \_config.yml file with a new collections section, and under that add your collection name, this time without the underscore, in my example `stories`. Then, assuming you want to output each of your stories as a separate page, add `output: true`.

The below shows what was added.

```
collections:
  stories:
    output: true
```

## Creating Pages and a Layout

Now you can start creating pages within your collection directory (`_stories`). It looks like either html or markdown format works, but I created mine as markdown so I could make use of a template.

I created a new template for stories as I wanted them to be a bit different from standard blog post pages. I created a `story.html` file in the `_layouts` directory. This template can be as simple as you want, as all it really needs are the `{{ title }}` and `{{ content }}` placeholders. I added some front matter to the story.html in layouts so it inherited the default layout, but you can edit this to suit your site layout.

Below is an example of a simple layout for your collection pages.

```
---
layout: default
---

<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
{{ content }}
```

Now we get to your collection content pages. All you need to do is create a separate markdown page per content page with the following front matter, layout, title and description.

```
---
layout: story
title: Story Title Goes Here
description: "The story description text goes here"
---
```

Then write your content underneath in markdown as you would on a post.

## Creating an Index Page

Lastly, you probably want a way of getting to your collection pages. I created a `stories.html` page in the site root to act as the index page for the stories. If you prefer you can create a directory called `stories` and put an index.html page in there instead.

The documentation says you can create a page in the `_stories` directory and give it a permalink but for me this made it appear in the loop below as well so it was linking to itself.

Anyway, you can loop through the pages in the collection using a simple for loop in your `stories.html` page as per below.

```
{% for item in site.stories %}
  <h2>{{ item.title }}</h2>
  <p>{{ item.description }}</p>
  <p><a href="{{ item.url }}">{{ item.title }}</a></p>
{% endfor %}
```

Hopefully this is all the information you need to start creating multiple post types using Jekyll and GitHub pages. My site is all set up. Now I need to do is to start writing some [stories](/stories/)…