Question

My blog is built with Jekyll on Github. In the navigation bar, the default order is Pages, Messages, About, Archives. I want to change the list to Pages, Archives, About, Messages. What should I do?

I think it is related to the code below

{% assign pages_list = site.pages %}

I think site.pages is what I should change, but I don’t know how.

Answer 1

The order of your navbar menu is determined by the HTML template in _layout (which may be pulling in HTML fragments from _includes.

It sounds like your navbar is being programatically generated from the list of pages provided in site.pages using the liquid code

{% assign pages_list = site.pages %}

If you have only a small number of pages, you may prefer to just write the list out manually. site.pages is Jekyll’s alphabetical list of all pages. Nothing stops you from just hardcoding this instead:

 <div class="navbar" id="page-top">
      <div class="navbar-inner">
        <div class="container">
          <a class="brand" href="/">EverCoding.net</a>
          <ul class="nav">
            <li><a href="/pages.html">Pages</a></li>        
        <li><a href="/archive.html">Archive</a></li>
        <li><a href="/about.html">About</a></li>
        <li><a href="/messages.html">Messages</a></li>

Whereas I’m guessing at the moment you have that list generated programmatically, perhaps by following the way Jekyll-bootstrap does with liquid code:

<div class="navbar">
      <div class="navbar-inner">
        <div class="container">
          <a class="brand" href="{{ HOME_PATH }}">{{ site.title }}</a>
          <ul class="nav">
            {% assign pages_list = site.pages %}
            {% assign group = 'navigation' %}
            {% include JB/pages_list %}
          </ul>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>

The liquid code in this second example is handy if you really want to determine the menu each time, but if you have a static menu in a static order you are probably best coding it by hand as in my first example, rather than modifying the liquid code to sort.

If you could link to the Jekyll source, rather than the published blog, we could be more specific.