Thakker's Corner

Adding Archives Page

May 31, 2020 | 2 minute read

Several blogs have an Archives section, which is a consolidated view of all the posts categorized and often configured by either year, month, tags, other attributes, etc.

My blog theme did not have an Archives page built into it. It had a Contact page which I had disabled, so the thought was… if that be configured, may be I can just add a new Archives page and enable / disable it via configuration setting.

OK, so the first thing was to see if there was an exisiting Archives plugin which I could just use….well, the Jekyll Archives sounded promising and so I decided to gave that a try:

Installation

Firstly, as indicated under their getting started section, I included the following gem setting in the Gemfile:

gem 'jekyll-archives'

Then I modified the _config.yml to update the plugin section as shown below:

plugin:
- jekyll-archives

At this point, I wanted to verify everything worked so I built the project and validated the installing of the gem file as shown below:

Fetching jekyll-archives 2.2.1
Installing jekyll-archives 2.2.1

Configuration

Next, I again updated the _config.yml file to include the following section:

jekyll-archives:
  enabled:
  - year
  layout: 'year-archive'
  permalinks:
    year: '/archives/'

Note:

  • I specified year value for enabled key. There are other options supported as well and can be read here.

  • For layout, I entered the name of the layout html file. This entry simply tells Jekyll to reference the year-archive.html file that was added to the _layouts folder (this is shown in the next section).

  • For permalinks, I entered the relative url for the archives page. This entry is used to ensure that the generated Archives page shows up under “websitedomain/archives/” path. There are other options supported for this as well and you can read them here

Next, I created year-archive.html file under _layouts folder and specified the format of the Archives page. There are sample layouts available here.

My setup is shown below:

Setup

Next step was to create an archive.md file under the root of the repository. This tells Jekyll to generate an html page for that .md file. The details of the archive.md file are shown below:

---
layout: page
title: Archives
permalink: '/archives/'
---

Final step was to again modify the _config.yml file to include the above generated archive.md file under the header_pages section. This tells Jekyll to display the Archives link on the main page. Following are the details of the changes:

---header_pages:
 - about.md
 - archive.md

And that’s it! In few steps I was able to get a basic Archives setup for my blog.

It did take me some time to understand the workings of _layouts folder and other details such as how permalinks worked, but other than that, the setup itself was relatively easy.

Hope you find this helpful! In future posts, I might explore additional customizations around archiving by different tags, categories, etc.

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