Collections

Skip lets you use lists of pages in your templates. These lists are referred to as collections.

Create a new subdirectory in your project called dogs:

>>> mkdir dogs

Now fill it with three files describing some breeds:

<!-- dogs/mastiff.md -->

---

tags:
    - dogs
    - large
name: Mastiff

---

# Mastiff

A large and powerful dog

<!-- dogs/border-collie.md -->

---

tags: 
    - dogs
    - medium
name: Border Collie

---

# Border Collie

A working and hearding dog

<!-- dogs/labrador.md -->

---

tags: 
    - dogs
    - medium
name: Labrador

---

# Labrador

A popular retriever dog

Great! After generating the site again you should now have these three pages in a /dogs/ folder.

Skip takes each file that has a tags attribute and adds it to a collection for each of its tags. So if we want to loop over our dog pages, we would use the dogs collection. If we wanted to only loop over the medium-sized dogs, we would use the medium collection.

Lets add a link to each of our dog pages to a page called dog-links.j2

<!-- dog-links.j2 -->

<ul>
    {% for dog_page in collections.dogs %}
    <li>
        <a href="{{ dog_page.get_permalink() }}">
            {{ dog_page.data.name }}
        </a>
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

Each page in the collection has a function get_permalink() that generates its url, as well as a data attribute that lets you use any of the data associated with the page. For more about what you can get from a page in a collection, see the advanced topic.

Now that you know about collections, you can look into pagination