Ability to specify Multiple Collections about collections HOT 8 CLOSED

I thought about it for a second when writing this originally but then got scared of the possibilities and didn't implement it haha. Would be curious to hear how you want to do it. The problem I saw was that it makes the single collection case more annoying to deal with? Maybe it can be behind a flag somehow.

from collections.

I'm not sure i understand how it makes a single collection more annoying to deal with? I mean, for the metalsmith-collections code of course, it's more annoying. From the UX perspective it's nearly identical for a user to add One Collection, or two (depending on the syntax).

Ie:

---
collection: foo
---

metal.use collections({
  foo: {}
})

vs

---
collection: foo bar
---

metal.use collections({
  foo: {},
  bar: {}
})

The syntax doesn't really change for the user. Now, the YAML is obviously wrong there.. in the sense that it's not a list. I believe collection: [foo, bar] would be the correct example. But even then, we could support [foo, bar] and 'foo' wouldn't be hard imo.

Perhaps (likely lol) i'm forgetting/missing something? I'm quite new to the project :)

from collections.

Ah, the one place where I see it gets more annoying is the .collection property added to the files. I've been using that in templates so that each file can know which collection it's in. Would need to be an array I guess for multiples, which makes the single case a bit uglier sadly.

from collections.

Perhaps a different namespace? collection and collections.

I'm not sure what collection would be, if there were many collections, but on the flipside collections would always be one or more items, within a list.

This would be something each user opts into, per document, so in theory they're responsible for handling the change in output (imo) - but i agree consistency is always optimal

from collections.

Yeah I think if we keep it behind a multiple flag that might work. And if multiple: false then we just grab the first collection in the YAML array. That way the simple case is foremost, but multiple can be achieved when needed. Multiple would add collections and single would add collection but never both.

from collections.

Sounds good, how would you like to see the multiple flag specified?

from collections.

Damn. I forgot this plugin just takes top-level collections. I guess we should change it to:

{
  collections: { ... },
  multiple: true
}

That would be kind of nice anyways, because it means we could have other top-level defaults across all collections like sortBy which I've been duplicating for now.

from collections.

btw, @anthonyshort just added support for this: #19

from collections.