robinmetral/jekyll-book-review

📚 Book reviews for your Jekyll site, built for Minima

jekyll-book-review

Book reviews for your Jekyll site, built for Minima 📚

In brief

The purpose of this project is to provide Jekyll users with a simple, hackable book reviews template.

It consists in two HTML layouts:

• _layouts/books.html displays a list of book reviews beloning to a custom Jekyll collection
• _layouts/review.html displays an individual book review with the book's cover, either self-hosted or imported through the Open Library Covers API

It was developed for Minima (the Jekyll default theme) and can be set up on a site running Minima in minutes, but it can also be easily adapted to any theme.

There's also a greater long-term vision for this project. I'll write about it soon and create a roadmap. Star/watch this repo to stay up to date!

Don't tell me, show me

Okay, here's the demo (on an out-of-the-box Jekyll site running Minima).

The books list:

An individual book review:

Installation

Requirements: a functional Jekyll site.

Summary (for the Minima theme)

1. Set up a custom books collection
2. Add the books.html and review.html layouts to your _layout directory
3. Create a books list page with the books layout
4. Write book reviews with the review layout

1. Set up a custom books collection

To get started with custom collections, you need to set them up in your Jekyll configuration file.

First, copy this code into your _config.yml file in your Jekyll root directory:

# Collections
collections:
    books:
        output: true
        permalink: /:collection/:title/

What it does:

• Define a new Jekyll collection named books
• Specify that each book review should have its own page, and that the reviews' permalink should be mywebsite.com/books/a-book-i-liked/

Then, create a folder named _books in your Jekyll root directory. This is where you'll write your book reviews!

For more information about collections, see Jekyll's amazing docs.

2. Add the books.html and review.html layouts to your _layouts directory

This step is pretty straightforward.

Copy the _layouts folder at the root of this repo into your Jekyll root directory.

If you have an existing _layouts folder in your Jekyll root, simply add in there the two template files, books.html and review.html.

3. Create a books list page with the books layout

Copy books.md to your root Jekyll directory.

The front matter:

• Make sure to specify layout: books in the front matter - this will display your books list
• Optionally specify a list_title: My reviews in the front matter to override the default "Latest reviews"
• Give a title to your page with title: Books and a permalink with permalink: /books/

The contents:

• Write anything and it will be displayed before your books list

4. Write book reviews with the review layout

You're all set up!

Writing a book review works much like writing a post.

Optionally, copy the book review template to your new /_books folder.

The front matter:

• Make sure to specify layout: review in the front matter
• Specify your review's date with date: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (this will display as the date you've read the book)
• Specify the book's title: title: A Great Book
• Specify the book's author: author: My Favourite Writer
• Specify the book's publication year: year: 2018
• If you want to display the book's cover image, there are two options:
  1. If you want to self-host your cover images: place a cover image in /assets/covers and specify your image's file name in front matter with cover: "2018-01-01-book-cover.jpg"
  2. If you want to use the Open Library Covers API to display your cover images: enter either the book's Open Library ID (which you can find on any Open Library book page with for example olid: OL7243520M or the book's ISBN with for example isbn: 9780156439619 (warning: some ISBNs do not yet have a listing on the Open Library and won't return a cover image)

A few additional notes about book covers:

• We recommend using the Open Library API with an Open Library ID
• Specify only one of either cover:, olid: or isbn:.
• The review.html layout will first display an image specified with cover:, if not look for an Open Library ID, if not look for an ISBN, and if not will not display any cover image
• In the future the system will support cover import from more varied sources

The contents:

• Write your book review using Markdown! You can insert images, bloquotes, text styling and others. For more information see the Markdown Cheatsheet!