Data and collections

Jekyll provides two main ways to create and maintain large lists/sets of items: data and collections.

The template comes with a few placeholder data lists for common needs, but if you need to create more/different ones, here's how.

This page just explains how to make these lists. To actually display them on your site, use the list component.

Data

If you want to have a large set of structured or nested items in a single file, use a data file.

Put a .yaml file in the /_data folder with any name, and fill it with data. The structure of the data can be arbitrary.

Example:

/_data/some-list.yaml

# some item
- title: Some name
  tags:
    - tag A
    - tag B
  description: Some description

# another item
...

Collections

If you want to have a large set of items in separate files that can also generate their own separate pages on your site, use collections.

Put .md files in a folder prefixed with a _, and fill their front matters with data. To generate a separate page for each item in the collection, set output: true in your config file as described here.

Example:

/_some-list/some-file.md

---
title: Some name
tags:
  - tag A
  - tag B
description: Some description
---

Some Markdown content

/_some-list/another-file.md

---
title: Another name
---

Some Markdown content