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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Learning how to Jekyll: the projects page."
+date: "2014-10-26"
+---
+
+So I wanted to create a better projects page. One that generates itself and generates every project page from some kind of input. Enter the world of Jekyll generators.
+
+I first was a bit put off by the prospect of diving into ruby. But I really wanted a way to generate new project pages based on content and not handcraft each page. I also wanted to use markdown for this because It would then be similar to the posts.
+
+So first I define a list of associative arrays in my main config that define my projects. These associative arrays contain a name, a markdown file and a thumbnail to be used on the main projects page. This is all information I need to add in the config.
+
+But then I need to generate the project page itself. This is where the Jekyll plug-in system comes into play. This is my project page generator.
+
+```
+module Jekyll
+
+	class ProjectPage < Page
+		def initialize(site, base, dir, project)
+			@site = site
+			@base = base
+			@dir = dir
+			@name = project['name'] + '.html'
+
+			self.process(@name)
+			self.read_yaml(File.join(base, '_layouts'), 'project.html')
+			self.data['project_name'] = project['name']
+
+			self.data['file'] = project['file']
+		end
+	end
+
+	class ProjectGenerator < Generator
+		safe true
+
+		def generate(site)
+			dir = site.config['projects_dir'] || 'Projects'
+			site.config['projects'].each do |project|
+				site.pages << ProjectPage.new(site, site.source, dir, project)
+			end
+		end
+	end
+end
+```
+
+This creates the necessary html pages, but now I still need to be able to "include" files from my custom Project folder. So I created an liquid tag that does that.
+
+```
+module Jekyll
+	class InputProjectTag < Liquid::Tag
+
+		def initialize(tag_name, text, tokens)
+			super
+			@text = text;
+		end
+
+		def render(context)
+			site = context.environments.first['site']
+
+			#set your project dir.
+			dir = 'Projects'
+			if defined? site.projects_dir
+				dir = site.projects_dir
+			end
+			source = site['source']
+
+			#render the variable to the markdown filename
+			content = Liquid::Template.parse(@text).render(context.environments.first)
+			path = File.join(File.join(source, dir), content);
+
+			input = IO.read(path.strip())
+
+			#render the markdown file with the variables of the project.
+			return Liquid::Template.parse(input).render(context)
+
+		end
+	end
+end
+
+Liquid::Template.register_tag('include_project', Jekyll::InputProjectTag)
+```
+
+The only downside of this is that with jekyll --watch new projects will not appear on the webpage, It seems the global config file is not watched, or maybe its something entirely different. I will look into this later down the line but for now I just wanted to share these modules.