Use fewer layouts

Jekyll uses templates stored in the _layouts folder to apply reusable designs to its pages. In a previous release, I created a list of page layouts in use on this site to help me spot inconsistencies.

For this release I've started to reduce the inconsistencies and duplicate code. The user story is the same though…

User story

As a user, I need the website pages to be consistent, so that I can read and browse them easily.

Acceptance criteria

• Combine the page and post layout into one
• Update the index.md to use the page layout
• Update the style guide to reflect the changes

What's changed

The biggest change was combining the page and post layouts. They are very similar, so it makes sense to merge them. But I do need to check if a page is a blog post, so that I can show the post date.

The if statement looks something like this…

{% if page.is_post %}
<small>{{ page.date | date: "%e %B %Y" }}</small>
{% endif %}

So that posts know they are posts, I had to add the following snippet to the _config.yml file.

defaults:
  -
    scope:
      path: ""      # empty string for all files
      type: posts   # limit to posts
    values:
      is_post: true # automatically set is_post=true for all posts