Collections

Not everything is a post or a page. Maybe you want to document the various methods in your open source project, members of a team, or talks at a conference. Collections allow you to define a new type of document that behave like Pages or Posts do normally, but also have their own unique properties and namespace.

Using Collections

To start using collections, follow these 3 steps:

• Step 1: Tell Bunto to read in your collection
• Step 2: Add your content
• Step 3: Optionally render your collection’s documents into independent files

Step 1: Tell Bunto to read in your collection

Add the following to your site’s _config.yml file, replacing my_collection with the name of your collection:

collections:
- my_collection

You can optionally specify metadata for your collection in the configuration:

collections:
  my_collection:
    foo: bar

Default attributes can also be set for a collection:

defaults:
  - scope:
      path: ""
      type: my_collection
    values:
      layout: page

Step 2: Add your content

Create a corresponding folder (e.g. <source>/_my_collection) and add documents. YAML front matter is processed if the front matter exists, and everything after the front matter is pushed into the document’s content attribute. If no YAML front matter is provided, Bunto will not generate the file in your collection.

Step 3: Optionally render your collection’s documents into independent files

If you’d like Bunto to create a public-facing, rendered version of each document in your collection, set the output key to true in your collection metadata in your _config.yml:

collections:
  my_collection:
    output: true

This will produce a file for each document in the collection. For example, if you have _my_collection/some_subdir/some_doc.md, it will be rendered using Liquid and the Markdown converter of your choice and written out to <dest>/my_collection/some_subdir/some_doc.html.

Configuring permalinks for collections

You can customize the Permalinks for your collection’s documents by setting permalink property in the collection’s configuration as follows:

collections:
  my_collection:
    output: true
    permalink: /awesome/:path/:title.:output_ext

In this example, the collection documents will the have the URL of awesome followed by the path to the document and its file extension.

Collections have the following template variables available for permalinks:

Permalink examples for collections

Depending on how you declare the permalinks in your configuration file, the permalinks and paths get written differently in the _site folder. A few examples will help clarify the options.

Let’s say your collection is called apidocs with doc1.md in your collection. doc1.md is grouped inside a folder called mydocs. Your project’s source directory for the collection looks this:

├── \_apidocs
│   └── mydocs
│       └── doc1.md

Based on this scenario, here are a few permalink options.

Permalink configuration 1: [Nothing configured]
Output:

├── apidocs
│   └── mydocs
│       └── doc1.html

Permalink configuration 2: /:collection/:path/:title:output_ext
Output:

├── apidocs
│   └── mydocs
│       └── doc1.html

Permalink configuration 3: No collection permalinks configured, but pretty configured for pages/posts.
Output:

├── apidocs
│   └── mydocs
│       └── doc1
│           └── index.html

Permalink configuration 4: /awesome/:path/:title.html
Output:

├── awesome
│   └── mydocs
│       └── doc1.html

Permalink configuration 5: /awesome/:path/:title/
Output:

├── awesome
│   └── mydocs
│       └── doc1
│           └── index.html

Permalink configuration 6: /awesome/:title.html
Output:

├── awesome
│   └── doc1.html

Permalink configuration 7: :title.html Output:

├── doc1.html

Liquid Attributes

Collections

Each collection is accessible as a field on the site variable. For example, if you want to access the albums collection found in _albums, you’d use site.albums.

Each collection is itself an array of documents (e.g., site.albums is an array of documents, much like site.pages and site.posts). See the table below for how to access attributes of those documents.

The collections are also available under site.collections, with the metadata you specified in your _config.yml (if present) and the following information:

Documents

In addition to any YAML Front Matter provided in the document’s corresponding file, each document has the following attributes:

Accessing Collection Attributes

Attributes from the YAML front matter can be accessed as data anywhere in the site. Using the above example for configuring a collection as site.albums, you might have front matter in an individual file structured as follows (which must use a supported markup format, and cannot be saved with a .yaml extension):

title: "Josquin: Missa De beata virgine and Missa Ave maris stella"
artist: "The Tallis Scholars"
director: "Peter Phillips"
works:
  - title: "Missa De beata virgine"
    composer: "Josquin des Prez"
    tracks:
      - title: "Kyrie"
        duration: "4:25"
      - title: "Gloria"
        duration: "9:53"
      - title: "Credo"
        duration: "9:09"
      - title: "Sanctus & Benedictus"
        duration: "7:47"
      - title: "Agnus Dei I, II & III"
        duration: "6:49"

Every album in the collection could be listed on a single page with a template:

{% for album in site.albums %}
  <h2>{{ album.title }}</h2>
  <p>Performed by {{ album.artist }}{% if album.director %}, directed by {{ album.director }}{% endif %}</p>
  {% for work in album.works %}
    <h3>{{ work.title }}</h3>
    <p>Composed by {{ work.composer }}</p>
    <ul>
    {% for track in work.tracks %}
      <li>{{ track.title }} ({{ track.duration }})</li>
    {% endfor %}
    </ul>
  {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}