Implementing sticky posts isn’t native to Jekyll, but easy to do. Datapages allows the creation of pages automatically based on data in a database.
Sticky posts
These are posts that stay at the top of lists and pages regardless of publish date. Normally posts are arranged in data decending order.
Identifying a post as sticky is done by adding an optional YAML entry to any post that wants to be sticky:
---
sticky: "local"
---
A value of “local” ensures the post is sticky on its taxonomy page eg ‘art’, but behaves like any other post elsewhere eg on the front page.
A value of “all” makes the post sticky on the taxonomy page and any other page it appears on.
A value of “front” makes the post sticky on the front page only.
And obviously no YAML entry at all is the default non-sticky post arranged by date.
The logic is handled in _layouts/front.html, not particularly elegantly but cleanly enough. The list of posts to be displayed is reordered with the required sticky posts brought to the start of the collection.
A post identified as sticky gets presented with a darker background by adding in a new css class to the div.
Datapages
Similar to Jekyll’s collections, datapages are created automatically based on formatted data read from a CSV file (for instance).
The datapages plugin runs a Generator creating content based on that CSV, settings in the _config.yml and layouts that provide a template into which the data is parsed.
Each record in the data produces a page.
So _data/art.csv lists my paintings, the plugin creates a page per record using the template at _layouts/datapages/art.html
The created pages can be identified because the template contains a YAML header :-
---
datapage: true
---
so they can be filtered from the site.pages collection as wanted.
