Front Matter

mkpages preserves YAML front matter from Markdown pages and adds layout and title when they are absent. Some fields are used by mkpages; other valid Jekyll fields are passed through unchanged.

Example

---
title: The File I Didn't Know Was an API
description: A small interface can be more powerful than it looks.
date: 2026-08-22
order: 10
featured: true
tags:
  - API
  - files
permalink: /blog/the-file-i-didnt-know-was-an-api/
---

Fields used by mkpages

• title: the page title. If omitted, mkpages uses the first H1 or derives a title from the filename.
• layout: the Jekyll layout. If omitted, mkpages adds layout: default.
• description: the summary shown in generated content cards.
• excerpt: used as a card summary when description is absent.
• order: an integer used to order content cards. Entries with an order value appear first, in ascending order.
• date: orders content cards when order does not decide their position.
• featured: use featured: true to include the page when a :::cards directive has featured=true.
• tags: a YAML list rendered on generated content cards, up to three tags.

For example, this directive lists featured pages from the blog folder:

<div class="card-grid card-grid-2">
</div>

Fields used by Jekyll

permalink overrides the default route generated from a Markdown filename:

permalink: /blog/the-file-i-didnt-know-was-an-api/

For example, blog/2026-08-22-the-file-i-didnt-know-was-an-api.md normally uses /blog/2026-08-22-the-file-i-didnt-know-was-an-api/; the permalink above publishes it at /blog/the-file-i-didnt-know-was-an-api/.

Other valid Jekyll front-matter fields are also preserved. mkpages only interprets the fields listed above, so use simple scalar values and YAML lists for metadata that needs to affect generated cards or their ordering.