Implementing categories

I want there to be Categories in Eleventy to organize articles into broad domains.¹ The idea is that all articles about books will go into the Culture category, articles about tech go into the Tech category, and so on.

• An article does not have to specify a category.
• An article can belong to only one category.
• Category names are Capitalized by convention.

Tags, on the other hand, can be in any category. A weird book and some weird code would be in different categories, but they could both be tagged weird.

How we’ll use them

Let’s look at how we’ll use categories:

• How to specify the category for an article
• How to get an article’s category in a template
• How to work with all of the articles in the same category

Specifying the category

Use the category property like this to specify the category an article belongs to:

---
date: 10/30/2018
title: Loomings
category: Tech
tags:
  - tools
  - git
  - eleventy
---

Using the category in a template

In a template, refer to the category property in the usual way:

<a href="/categories/Tech">Tech</a>

Working with articles in the same category

We can work with articles in the same category by creating a categories collection.² To list all of the articles in the Tech category, you could do it this way:

<ul>
  {%- for article in collections.categories["Tech"] -%}
    <li>{{ article.data.title }}</li>
  {%- endfor -%}
</ul>

Just as collections is an object that has a property for each tag, so collections.categories has a property for each category. Each property refers to an array of articles. It looks something like this:

collections: {
  all: [ items ],
  categories: {
    Culture: [ items ],
    Life: [ items ],
    Thinking: [ items ]
  }
}

The implementation

We want:

• a list of categories
• an object that contains a property for each category, and each property is a list of articles for that category

Creating a list of categories

To get the list of categories, we iterate over all of the rendered templates. This code creates a collection called categoryList that contains the names of all the categories.

getCatList = function(collection) {
  let catSet = new Set()

  collection.getAllSorted().forEach(item =>
        typeof item.data.category === "string"
    &&  catSet.add(item.data.category))

  return [...catSet]
}

eleventyConfig.addCollection("categoryList", getCatList)

Creating a list of articles for each category

To get lists of each article in a category, we want to create an object that has a property for each category, and each property contains a list of articles of that category. In other words, we want to end up with an object that looks like this:

categories {
  Culture: [article_1, article_4],
  Tech: [article_3],
  Life: [article_1, article_3]
}

We can use the makeCategories() function as a callback to to addCollection() to create this object. We iterate over each item that has a category property in its front matter and add it to the list for that category:³

makeCategories = function(collection) {
  let categories = {}

    // Every rendered page

  collection.getAllSorted().forEach(item => {
    let category = item.data.category

      // Ignore the ones without a category

    if (typeof category !== "string")
      return

    if (Array.isArray(categories[category]))
        //  category array exists? Just push
      categories[category].push(item)
    else
        //  Otherwise create it and
        //  make `item` the first, uh, item.
      categories[category] = [item]
  })

  return categories
}

Since we want to call our collection of categories categories, we’d build it like this:

addCollection("categories", makeCategories)

So now we have a way to make a collection that has collections of its own. I use it to segregate my posts into unique buckets.