Introduction

Basic navigation is easy in Jekyll as we can hardcode links like we do on the Bakery Store navigation in _layouts/default.html:

...
<nav class="main-nav">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/blog.html">Blog</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>
...

It gets trickier if we want to highlight the current page. One way to do this is add an active class if the current page’s url matches the link:

...
<nav class="main-nav">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/" {% if page.url == "/" %}class="active"{% endif %}>Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/blog.html" {% if page.url == "/blog.html" %}class="active"{% endif %}>Blog</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>
...

Then we can add CSS to style.css to make the active link yellow:

...
a.active {
  color: #FFE000;
}
...

Highlighted Link

This works but there’s a lot of repetition.

Using front matter

A better way is to highlight the navigation using front matter. For the pages we want in the navigation, we’ll add a navigation_weight to the front matter. The value of navigation_weight is a number which dictates the position it’s shown. For index.html we’ll add a navigation_weight of 1:

---
layout: default
title: Home
navigation_weight: 1
---
...

And for blog.html we’ll add a navigation_weight of 2:

---
layout: default
title: Blog
navigation_weight: 2
---
...

Then instead of having static links in _layouts/default.html, we can sort our html pages by their navigation_weight, loop over the pages that have a navigation_weight and output the url, title and an active class if it’s the current page:

...
<nav class="main-nav">
  <ul>
    {% assign navigation_pages = site.html_pages | sort: 'navigation_weight' %}
    {% for p in navigation_pages %}
      {% if p.navigation_weight %}
        <li>
          <a href="{{ p.url }}" {% if p.url == page.url %}class="active"{% endif %}>
            {{ p.title }}
          </a>
        </li>
      {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
</nav>
...

Now when we add a new page, we can add it to the navigation by setting navigation_weight in front matter.

Summary

This technique works great for smaller sites but will start to slow down the build time on larger sites. For large sites have a look at advanced navigation.