You can think of these Jekyll helpers as little shortcuts. Since GitHub Pages doesn’t allow most plugins — custom tags are out. Instead the theme leverages includes to do something similar.

Group by array

Jekyll Group-By-Array by Max White.

A liquid include file for Jekyll that allows an object to be grouped by an array.

Figure

Generate a <figure> element with a single image and caption.

Using the figure include like so:

{% include figure image_path="/assets/images/unsplash-image-10.jpg" alt="this is a placeholder image" caption="This is a figure caption." %}

Will output the following:

<figure>
  <img src="/assets/images/unsplash-image-10.jpg" alt="this is a placeholder image">
  <figcaption>This is a figure caption.</figcaption>
</figure>

Gallery

Generate a <figure> element with optional caption of arrays with two or more images.

To place a gallery add the necessary YAML Front Matter.

gallery:
  - url: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-1.jpg
    image_path: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-1-th.jpg
    alt: "placeholder image 1"
    title: "Image 1 title caption"
  - url: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-2.jpg
    image_path: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-2-th.jpg
    alt: "placeholder image 2"
    title: "Image 2 title caption"
  - url: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-3.jpg
    image_path: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-3-th.jpg
    alt: "placeholder image 3"
    title: "Image 3 title caption"

And then drop-in the gallery include in the body where you’d like it to appear.

{% include gallery caption="This is a sample gallery with **Markdown support**." %}

Gallery example with caption:

More Gallery Goodness: A few more examples and source code can be seen in this sample gallery post.

Feature row

Designed to compliment the splash page layout as a way of arranging and aligning “feature blocks” containing text or image.

To add a feature row containing three content blocks with text and image, add the following YAML Front Matter

feature_row:
  - image_path: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-1-th.jpg
    alt: "placeholder image 1"
    title: "Placeholder 1"
    excerpt: "This is some sample content that goes here with **Markdown** formatting."
  - image_path: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-2-th.jpg
    alt: "placeholder image 2"
    title: "Placeholder 2"
    excerpt: "This is some sample content that goes here with **Markdown** formatting."
    url: "#test-link"
    btn_label: "Read More"
    btn_class: "btn--inverse"
  - image_path: /assets/images/unsplash-gallery-image-3-th.jpg
    title: "Placeholder 3"
    excerpt: "This is some sample content that goes here with **Markdown** formatting."

And then drop-in the feature row include in the body where you’d like it to appear.

{% include feature_row %}

Placeholder 1

This is some sample content that goes here with Markdown formatting.

Placeholder 2

This is some sample content that goes here with Markdown formatting.

Read More

Placeholder 3

This is some sample content that goes here with Markdown formatting.

More Feature Row Goodness: A few more examples and source code can be seen in the demo site.

Responsive video embed

Embed a video from YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive, or bilibili that responsively sizes to fit the width of its parent. To help with GDPR compliance, the theme is using the privacy enhanced version of YouTube and Vimeo providers out of the box.

YouTube

To embed the following YouTube video at url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsxDH4HcOWA (long version) or https://youtu.be/XsxDH4HcOWA (short version) into a post or page’s main content you’d use:

{% include video id="XsxDH4HcOWA" provider="youtube" %}

To embed it as a video header you’d use the following YAML Front Matter

header:
  video:
    id: XsxDH4HcOWA
    provider: youtube

Tip: if you’d like to start the video at a particular timestamp, you can append ?start=110 (for instance) to the video id in order to have the video start at 1:50.

Vimeo

To embed the following Vimeo video at url https://vimeo.com/212731897 into a post or page’s main content you’d use:

{% include video id="212731897" provider="vimeo" %}

To embed it as a video header you’d use the following YAML Front Matter

header:
  video:
    id: 212731897
    provider: vimeo

Google Drive

To embed the following Google Drive video at url https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u41lIbMLbV53PvMbyYc9HzvBug5lNWaO/preview into a post or page’s main content you’d use:

{% include video id="1u41lIbMLbV53PvMbyYc9HzvBug5lNWaO" provider="google-drive" %}

To embed it as a video header you’d use the following YAML Front Matter

header:
  video:
    id: 212731897
    provider: google-drive

Bilibili

To embed the following Bilibili video at url https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1E7411e7hC into a post or page’s main content you’d use:

{% include video id="BV1E7411e7hC" provider="bilibili" %}

If you want to enable danmaku (弹幕) for the embedded video, which is disabled by default, you can supply an additional parameter danmaku="1" as shown below:

{% include video id="BV1E7411e7hC" provider="bilibili" danmaku="1" %}

To embed it as a video header you’d use the following YAML Front Matter:

header:
  video:
    id: BV1E7411e7hC
    provider: bilibili
    danmaku: 1

Table of contents

Auto-generated table of contents list for your posts and pages can be enabled using two methods.

Enabled via YAML Front Matter

Add toc: true to the YAML Front Matter of any post or page.

TOC example with custom title and icon

toc: true
toc_label: "My Table of Contents"
toc_icon: "cog"
---

Note: using both methods will have unintended results. Be sure to remove {% include toc %} placed table of contents from your content when using toc: true.

Good headings:

# Heading
## Heading
### Heading
### Heading
# Heading
## Heading

Bad headings:

# Heading
### Heading (skipped H2)
##### Heading (skipped H4)

Enabled via toc include (deprecated)

To include a Kramdown auto-generated table of contents for posts and pages, add the following helper to your content.

{% include toc %}

Note: this method only works with Markdown files.

Deprecated: toc helper will be removed in the next major version of the theme. It is encouraged that you migrate to the YAML Front Matter method above.

TOC example with custom title and icon

{% include toc icon="cog" title="My Table of Contents" %}

Navigation list

Include an unordered list of links to be used as sidebar navigation with the nav_list helper.

1. Start by adding a set of titles and URLs to _data/navigation.yml in the same way the main navigation is built.

foo navigation example:

# _data/navigation.yml
foo:
  - title: "Link 1 Title"
    url: /link-1-page-url/

  - title: "Link 2 Title"
    url: http://external-link.com

  - title: "Link 3 Title"
    url: /link-3-page-url/

  - title: "Link 4 Title"
    url: /link-4-page-url/

For a navigation list that has child pages you’d structure the YAML like this:

# _data/navigation.yml
foo:
  - title: "Parent Link 1"
    url: /parent-1-page-url/
    children:
      - title: "Child Link 1"
        url: /child-1-page-url/
      - title: "Child Link 2"
        url: /child-2-page-url/

  - title: "Parent Link 2"
    url: /parent-2-page-url/
    children:
      - title: "Child Link 1"
        url: /child-1-page-url/
      - title: "Child Link 2"
        url: /child-2-page-url/
      - title: "Child Link 3"
        url: /child-3-page-url/

2: On the page(s) you’d like the foo sidebar nav add the following YAML Front Matter, referencing the same key name.

sidebar:
  nav: "foo"

ProTip: If you’re applying the same navigation list to several pages setting it as a Front Matter default is the better option.

The theme’s documentation is built with the nav_list helper so if you’d like an example to dissect take a look at navigation.yml, _config.yml and _doc collection in the /docs/ folder of this repo.

To add a navigation list to a post or page’s main content instead of the sidebar use the include this way:

{% include nav_list nav="foo" %}