Jekyll plugins

One main reason we chose to build this template on top of Jekyll is that it is probably the most heavily adopted static site generation tool. A benefit of that is that there is a large ecosystem of plugins to choose from for additional functionality.

If there already exists a Jekyll plugin to achieve a feature (properly and reliably), we elect to not build it into the template.

Pre-installed

These plugins are so useful that we've chosen to bundle them in the template by default. Some of the features in the template rely on these plugins, and these docs assumed they are installed.

Plugin	Description
jekyll-spaceship	A Jekyll "Swiss Army Knife". Provides support for table, mathjax, plantuml, mermaid, emoji, video, audio, youtube, vimeo, dailymotion, soundcloud, spotify, etc. See its docs for more info.
html-proofer	Not a Jekyll-specific plugin, but very useful. Checks for broken links, images, and more. It is installed by default, but not enabled by default. See how to enable it.
jekyll-sitemap	Generates a sitemap file and puts it in your website (hidden) for search engines to see.
jekyll-redirect-from	Allows you to add a redirect_from field to a page's front matter. When a user visits one of the URLs listed, they'll be redirected to the page instead.
jekyll-feed	Generates an RSS-like feed of your blog posts and puts it in your website (hidden) for RSS tools to see.
jekyll-last-modified-at	Allows you to access the last time a file on your site was changed.

Usage of each of these plugins is either passive, or documented on another page where appropriate.

Others

These plugins will be very useful to some, but weren't or couldn't be included in the template for various reasons.

Plugin	Description
jekyll-multiple-languages-plugin	Allows authoring you site content in multiple languages. Very valuable, but a very involved setup and effort.
jekyll-scholar	An alternative or supplement to the built-in citation capabilities of the template.
jekyll-github-metadata	Populates site-wide fields like title and description from your GitHub repo if not set.
jekyll-avatar	Imports a GitHub avatar image from a user name, which you can size and style as you wish.
jekyll-gist	Imports a GitHub Gist and displays its text.

To install a plugin, follow the instructions here. In summary:

1. Add - jekyll-some-plugin under plugins: in your _config.yaml file.

2. Add gem "jekyll-some-plugin" under group :jekyll_plugins do in your Gemfile file.

3. Generate a new Gemfile.lock file by previewing your site locally.