Jekyll Collections Versus Posts

Differences

These are the main differences between Collections and posts.

Categories

A post in a subdirectory structure automatically gets subdirectories names as its categories.

A collection does not have categories by default.

Filenames

Post filenames must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD-title.<markup> which assigns the post date, used to sort posts by creation date.

Collection filenames doesn’t need any special format in filenames, they get the date from the file creation date.

Directories

Posts have the restriction of being only recognized if they are located under a _posts folder. This restriction won’t be removed as it is being kept to not break previous versions.

Collections can be located directly in any directory of the collection folder.

Dates

This is one of the most important difference between them.

Posts were originally aimed for blogs, so the date is a central concept that is also displayed in its filename, they are not likely to get updated after published.

└── _posts
   ├── 2016-11-19-why-every-developer-should-use-emacs.md
   └── 2016-06-20-open-source-in-governments.md

• Beside collections have a date property, this is not an important concept as it is in posts, a clear structure is needed to locate each file quickly when needed to update or add data to them.

└── _my_collection
   ├── open-source-in-governments.md
   └── why-every-developer-should-use-emacs.md

Summary

Considering publishing a list of books with both approaches:

• a list of standard posts in books folder.

• a collection in _books folder, with the following configuration:

  • In /_config.yml:

      collections:
        books:
          output: true
    

This is how they basically compare:

Choosing between Collections and Posts

Features of Collections:

• a cleaner directory/subdirectories structure without _posts folder in each nested level
• cleaner filenames without mandatory dates.
• In a hierarchical subdirectoy structure, categories can be simulated processing the path property of each file.
• Collection filenames put more emphasis in its title, not the date.

Features of Posts:

• Posts were introduced in Jekyll before collections, so they are widely adopted and with more plugins available.
• Posts filenames put more emphasis in dates, not the titles.
• when using nested directories, creating each subdirectory index is straightforward.

References

• Jekyll Collections docs https://jekyllrb.com/docs/collections/
• Jekyll Posts docs https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/