Jekyll Boilerplate

Jekyll is rad! It’s a simple, blog aware, static site generator built in Ruby. It takes a template directory, runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website. Boom!

If you are interested in getting started this should help you out.

This repository is based off Jekyll Base by Daniel McGraw Jekyll Base.

Structure

.
|-- .gitignore
|-- README
|-- _config.yml
|-- _layouts
|   |-- default.html
|   |-- post.html
|-- _includes
|-- _posts
|   |-- 1970-01-01-placeholder-post.md
|-- index.html

_config.yml

This is where you will be putting your Jekyll configuration options. If this file is omitted Jekyll will use its defualts to build your site. You can find the configuration options and default configuration here.

_layouts

This folder is where all the layout templates are stored.

default.html

This is the base layout template. There are no naming conventions, but if you choose to change this file's name make sure you update all the layout references in your file's YAML Front Matter blocks. To learn more about the use of YAML Front Matter check out this page.

post.html

This is the base post template.

_posts

This folder is where all the posts are stored. Notice the naming convention that is used. You will want to name your files with the the publish date preceeding the posts title all seperated by dashes (Year-Month-Day-Title-Of-The-Post.md). The post date that you see is pulled straight from this filename so make sure you lable your files right.

1970-01-01-placeholder-post.md

This is a simple blog post using markdown. To learn more about markdown check out the markdown syntax documentation. Also notice that there is YAML Front Matter in this file specifying the layout it will use and the title of the post. Layout is one of a couple predefined global variables. You can also specify custom variables in the YAML Front Matter.

index.html

This is used to render the site's index. It is essntially a post loop wrapped in your base layout.