---
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.