You can automatically link together topics belonging to the same series. This helps users know the context within a particular process.

Using series for pages

You create a series by looking for all pages within a tag namespace that contain certain frontmatter. Here’s a demo.

1. Create the series button

First create an include that contains your series button:

<div class="seriesContext">
    <div class="btn-group">
        <button type="button" data-toggle="dropdown" class="btn btn-primary dropdown-toggle">Series Demo <span class="caret"></span></button>
        <ol class="dropdown-menu">
            {% assign pages = site.pages | sort:"weight"  %}
            {% for p in pages %}
            {% if p.series == "ACME series" %}
            {% if p.url == page.url %}
            <li class="active"> → {{p.weight}}. {{p.title}}</li>
            {% else %}
            <li>
                <a href="{{p.url | prepend: '..'}}">{{p.weight}}. {{p.title}}</a>
            </li>
            {% endif %}
            {% endif %}
            {% endfor %}
        </ol>
    </div>
</div>

Change “ACME series” to the name of your series.

Save this in your _includes/custom folder as something like series_acme.html.

2. Create the “next” include

Now create another include for the Next button at the bottom of the page. Copy the following code, changing the series name to your series’name:

<p>{% assign series_pages = site.tags.series_acme %}
    {% for p in pages %}
    {% if p.series == "ACME series" %}
    {% assign nextTopic = page.weight | plus: "1"  %}
    {% if p.weight == nextTopic  %}
    <a href="{{p.url | prepend: '..'}}"><button type="button" class="btn btn-primary">Next: {{p.weight}}  {{p.title}}</button></a>
    {% endif %}
    {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
</p>

Change “acme” to the name of your series.

Save this in your _includes/custom/mydoc folder as series_acme_next.html.

3. Add the correct frontmatter to each of your series pages

Now add the following frontmatter to each page in the series:

series: "ACME series"
weight: 1.0

With weights, Jekyll will treat 10 as coming after 1. If you have more than 10 items, consider changing plus: "1.0" to plus: "0.1".

Additionally, if your page names are prefaced with numbers, such as “1. Download the code,” then the {{p.weight}} will create a duplicate number. In that case, just remove the {{p.weight}} from both code samples here.

On each series page, add a link to the series button at the top and a link to the next button at the bottom.

<!-- your frontmatter goes here -->

{% include custom/series_acme.html %}

<!-- your page content goes here ... -->

{% include custom/series_acme_next.html %}

Changing the series drop-down color

The Bootstrap menu uses the primary class for styling. If you change this class in your theme, the Bootstrap menu should automatically change color as well. You can also just use another Bootstrap class in your button code. Instead of btn-primary, use btn-info or btn-warning. See Labelsfor more Bootstrap button classes.

Using a collection with your series

Instead of copying and pasting the button includes on each of your series, you could also create a collection and define a layout for the collection that has the include code. For more information on creating collections, see Collections.