So let’s start by reminding every one on how to get started with Jekyll, in this post: Jekyll Getting Started
That should give a you a reminder of where to start off 😀

Needing a documentation repo

A little while Atlassian announced that they are stopping support for local server installs of Confluence. Boring ‼️
I have literally moved my content from Mediawiki to Confluence just two months ago 😫

I guess this has been on my mind for a while. I don’t need a wiki, I need a documentation repository.
So a little bit of googling I find a nice simple template.
The template didn’t use Bootstrap, or jQuery, which I thought would be fine … err .. I guess I’m a Bootstrap / jQuery geek? LOL 😝

So I do a litle bit of this, and little bit of that, and I have the basis of a docs website.

Sorting data

My first hurdle is I like categorising my data into “spaces” and then categories.
What I really want is a structure like:

Personal
  - Animals
      - A cat named Tivo
      - Lexi the Spaniel
  - Technical-Docs
      - A script I wrote
      - A thing I learned
Net Enterprises
  - Technical-Docs
      - Ip addresses
      - SMTP Server
  - General-Docs
      - Stuff
      - Things

Creating a “collection”

so I’ll start by creating a “collection” in my _config.yml:

collections:
  docs:
    title: Documentation
    permalink: /:path/
    output: true

Now I’ll need to create some rules for my documentation:

• A page title
• a “space”
• a single category
• an order (because I’m going to use that later on)

---
title: Lexi the Spaniel
space: Personal
category: Animals
order: 5
---

My documents are stored in the directory _docs/Personal/* and _docs/Net-Enterprises/*
e.g. _docs/Personal/Lexi-The-Spaniel.md

Creating a dynamic menu

Now I need to create a menu.
This took me ages !!!! A couple of days of trying different things !!
And the result … 15 lines of code 😧

 {% assign space_groups = site.docs | group_by: 'space' %}
 {% for s_group in space_groups %}
 {{ s_group.name  }}
     {% assign CATEGORIES = "" | split: ',' %}
     {% for s in s_group.items %}
         {% assign CATEGORIES = CATEGORIES | push: s.category | uniq %}
     {% endfor %}
     {% for cat in CATEGORIES %}
     {{ cat }}
     {% assign local_list = s_group.items | where: "category", cat %}
         {% for i in local_list %}
         {{ i.title }} - {{ site.baseurl }}{{ i.url }}
         {% endfor %}
     {% endfor %}
 {% endfor %}

The Result

Let skip straight to the screenshot 😂

Anyway .. drop me a comment if you need help with Jekyll things