metalsmith-collections

A Metalsmith plugin that lets you group files together into an ordered collection, like blog posts. That way you can loop over them to generate an index, or add 'next' and 'previous' links between them.

Features

can match files by collection metadata
can match files by pattern
adds collections to global metadata
adds next and previous references to each file in the collection

Installation

$ npm install metalsmith-collections

Usage

There are two ways to create collections:

by pattern - this is just passing a globing pattern that will group any files that match into the same collection.
by metadata - this is adding a specific collection metadata field to each item that you want to add to a collection.

The simplest way to create a collection is to use a pattern to match the files you want to group together:

var collections = require('metalsmith-collections');

metalsmith.use(collections({
  articles: '*.md'
}));

Which is just a shorthand. You could also add additional options:

metalsmith.use(collections({
  articles: {
    pattern: '*.md',
    sortBy: 'date',
    reverse: true
  }
}));

But you can also match based on a collection property in each file's metadata by omitting a pattern, and adding the property to your files:

metalsmith.use(collections({
  articles: {
    sortBy: 'date',
    reverse: true
  }
}));

---
title: My Article
collection: articles
date: 2013-02-21
---

My article contents...

All of the files with a matching collection will be added to an array that is exposed as a key of the same name on the global Metalsmith metadata.

CLI Usage

All of the same options apply, just add them to the "plugins" key in your metalsmith.json configuration:

{
  "plugins": {
    "metalsmith-collections": {
      "articles": {
        "sortBy": "date",
        "reverse": true
      }
    }
  }
}

License