Pages

Pages are the most basic building block for content. They’re useful for standalone content (content which is not date based or is not a group of content such as staff members or recipes).

The simplest way of adding a page is to add an HTML file in the root directory with a suitable filename. You can also write a page in Markdown using a .md extension which converts to HTML on build. For a site with a homepage, an about page, and a contact page, here’s what the root directory and associated URLs might look like:

.
├── about.md    # => http://example.com/about.html
├── index.html    # => http://example.com/
└── contact.html  # => http://example.com/contact.html

If you have a lot of pages, you can organize them into subfolders. The same subfolders that are used to group your pages in your project’s source will then exist in the _site folder when your site builds. However, when a page has a different permalink set in the front matter, the subfolder at _site changes accordingly.

.
├── about.md          # => http://example.com/about.html
├── documentation     # folder containing pages
│   └── doc1.md       # => http://example.com/documentation/doc1.html
├── design            # folder containing pages
│   └── draft.md      # => http://example.com/design/draft.html

Changing the output URL

You might want to have a particular folder structure for your source files that changes for the built site. With permalinks you have full control of the output URL.

Liquid Representation

From Jekyll 4.1 onwards, there is a minor change in how instances of Jekyll::Page are exposed to layouts and other Liquid templates. Jekyll::Page instances now use a Liquid::Drop instead of a Hash. This change results in greater performance for a site with numerous standlone pages not within a collection.

For plugin developers

While end-users do not need to take any extra action due to this change, plugin authors depending on the existing behavior may need to make minor changes to their plugins.

If a Jekyll::Page subclass’ to_liquid method calls super, it will have to be slightly modified.

class Foo::BarPage < Jekyll::Page
  def to_liquid(*)
    payload = super        # This needs to be changed to `super.to_h`
                           # to obtain a Hash as in v4.0.0.

    do_something(payload)  # Logic specific to `Foo::BarPage` objects
  end
end

Jekyll::Page subclasses won’t inherit the optimization automatically until the next major version. However, plugin authors can opt-in to the optimization in their subclasses by wrapping the temporary liquid_drop method if the subclass doesn’t override the superclass method:

class Foo::BarPage < Jekyll::Page
  def to_liquid(*)
    liquid_drop    # Returns an instance of `Jekyll::Drops::PageDrop`.
                   # Will be removed in Jekyll 5.0.
  end
end