Posts and Drafts in Jekyll

In this third part I’ll explain how to work with posts and drafts in Jekyll.

Front-matter

Any file that contains a YAML block in the begining of the file will be processed by Jekyll in a special way. This applies to posts and HTML, XML files or any other file. An example of a front-matter block is the following:

---
layout: post
title: This is a cool post
---

What is between the 3 horizontal lines --- is considered a YAML block. This information will be used in Jekyll and will be available during the file and the documents related to this one, besides the will have Liquid tags available. If you want to use the Liquid tags and data, but no need to set anything in the YAML block you still can define an empty YAML block to make Jekyll process the file.

Posts and drafts

The posts are the content we put usually in the _posts directory and are wrote in languages like Markdown or other options, but I’ll explain the Markdown only because it’s simplicity and clean clode.

Posts

Posts are named by standar in the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.FORMAT

Where YEAR is a 4 digits number, MONTH and DAY are two digits numbers and FORMAT is the extension in which is writted the content, for example:

2014-01-28-hello-world.md
2013-12-24-christmass-with-rudolph.textile

The posts must start with a Front-matter YAML block.

Drafts

Drafts are actually post files that reside on the _drafts directory and they don’t have a date because they haven’t being published. These files are ignored by default by Jekyll (you could still force Jekyll to include them), this allows you to keep separated the published documents and the drafts, do they don’t get pushed to your production site. When you decide to publish them you just have to move them from _drafts to _posts and assign them a publication date in the file name.

The post

An example of a post (or draft) is the following:

---
title: Hello world
layout: post
---
In the first lines we can place the excerpt separated from the content
by 1 empty line (2 consecutive carry returns).

## A subtitle
And a lot more content after

In this example we define a title for the post and the layout to be used, in this case is _layouts/post.html. The first lines before the first 2 consecutive carry returns are populated in the variable excerpt.

In the next series I’ll explain about Markdown and how to compile Jekyll to generate the site.