Beautiful Jekyll v6.0.1

This version has been in the works for a few years. It includes several new features that were highly requested, numerous bug fixes, new documentation, and aggresively encourages migrating from the old Google Universal Analytics to the new Analytics 4.

Breaking changes

• As of July 2023, Google Universal Analytics is going away and being replaced by Google Analytics 4. Beautiful Jekyll sites that still use the old analytics tag will show a warning to encourage them to move to Analytics 4 (#1096).
• More control over RSS feed sharing: previously, an RSS feed was always generated, and if the config setting rss-description was set then there was an RSS icon in the footer. Now, an RSS feed is only generated when the config setting rss-description exists, and an RSS footer icon is only shown if rss: true is set in the social-network-links config settings.

New parameters and settings

• Added navbar-var-length config setting that allows the navigation menu to be the same length as the longest sub-menu, so that long words in the submenu are not cut off (#765)
• Added post_search config setting that creates a Search button in the navbar (#770)
• Added edit_page_button config setting that adds a "Edit page" button to the footer (to edit the current page on GitHub) (#1004)
• Added footer-hover-col config setting to customize the hover colour of links in the footer (#848)

New features and improvements

• Made the home page feed more accessible for screen readers (#950)
• Added support for giscus comments (#886) and CommentBox (#960)
• Added support for Cloudflare Analytics (#797)
• Added Reddit in share options of posts (#815)

Bug fixes

• Fixed page titles, subtitles, and excerpts rendering correctly when there are special characeters in them (#856)
• Fixed bug where navbar secondary level dropdown items didn't inherit the same colour as the primary navbar links
• Fixed bug where the navbar "burger" collapsed button didn't always revert back to a light colour
• Fixed bug where using an image as a navbar title did not render in GitHub Project pages that did not have a custom domain
• Fixed bug where image thumbnails on the feed page were always forced into a square rather than maintaining a proper image aspect ratio
• Fixed bug where special characters in the title led to broken share tags (#744)
• Fixed bug where staticman didn't work jQuery slim version is used (#766)
• Fixed very long strings to wrap around the next line rather than go off-screen (#787)

Small changes

• Updated staticman from using v2 (public servers) to v3 (private servers) due to the public servers becoming obsolete (#775)
• Added social network links for Patreon, Medium, Itch.io, Discord, Kaggle, Hackerrank (#783, #788, #907, #961, #978)
• Slightly reworked margins and position for avatar image to resolve an alignment issue on Safari
• Changed the width at which the navbar collapses to a higher threshold because most modern non-mobile browsers are >1000px

Beautiful Jekyll v5.0.0

One of the major changes in this version is that a lot of time was spent on rethinking the entire SEO and social media sharing model (how a page looks on eg. Google, Twitter, Facebok). It was redesigned to be more simple and customizable. The new documentation has a section dedicated to SEO and social media sharing of a page. Unfortunately some changes that are not backwards-compatible had to be made.

Breaking changes

• Renamed description YAML parameter to share-description to be more clear
• Renamed description config setting to rss-description since it was only used in RSS (the FAQ explains the difference between YAML parameters and config settings if you're confused)
• Removed YAML parameter use-site-title (you can now specify the exact title using share-title)
• Removed undocumented YAML parameters meta-title and meta-description
• Removed link-tags config setting because it wasn't necessary. If you use tags, there will now always be a tags page created; if you don't use tags there won't be a tags page.
• The YAML parameter show-avatar is now true by default. This has always been the case for GitHub Pages users, but not for remote_theme users. For consistency, it's now the default for everyone. (#715)

New parameters and settings

• Added full-width YAML parameter to allow having full-width pages
• Added feed_show_excerpt config setting to show/hide the post excerpts on the feed page
• Added feed_show_tags config setting to show/hide the list of tags on post previews on the feed page
• Added share-title YAML parameter to give control over the search engine/social media title
• Added last-updated YAML parameter to show a "Last Updated on" date for blog posts
• Added before-content and after-content YAML parameters that allow you to add some common HTML before the main content of a page (below the title) or after the main content (above the footer). Works in a similar way to footer-extra.
• Added head-extra YAML parameter which is similar to footer-extra but is used to include custom HTML code in a page's <head> tag
• Added site-js config setting to provide JavaScript files that are used on all pages in the site

New features and improvements

• Improved the footer-extra YAML parameter to support multiple files instead of only a single file
• Added automatic navbar color detection (#702)
• When nav-short is turned on, the avatar will also be shorter
• Changed navbar and footer background colour to be slightly darker, for better contrast with the default white page background for accessibility reasons
• Changed the behaviour of site-css to include site-wide CSS file before instead of after page-specific files
• Renamed internal css/js files from "main" to "beautifuljekyll" to make it easier for users to troubleshoot
• Added alt text to all images for better accessibility
• Made thumbnail images square instead of circles, as users reported that circles cut off important parts of images

Bug fixes

• Fixed rendering issues with nav-short parameter that caused the body of the page to start too low
• Fixed some CSS styles that broke during the bootstrap 4 migration (#716)

Library upgrades

• Upgraded kramdown to version 2.3.0 to fix security issues
• Upgraded jQuery to version 3.5.1 to fix a couple security vulnerabilities with the previous version

Beautiful Jekyll v4.1.0

• Add Open Graph site_name meta field to pages automatically
• Add text-col config setting for main text color (#694)
• Add keywords config setting to set the meta keywords on all pages (for SEO purposes) (#691)
• Add mobile-theme-col config setting to allow a mobile theme colour (#692)
• Add site-css config setting in the config file to provide CSS files that are used on all pages in the site (#695)
• Add YAML option description: creates the meta description on a page, intended to provide a brief description of the page for search engines and when the page is shared (#690)

Beautiful Jekyll v4.0.1

• Fixed staticman comments UI that was broken since the migration to bootstrap 4

Beautiful Jekyll v4.0.0

• BREAKING CHANGE Replace image YAML parameter with thumbnail-img to be more clear
• MAJOR BEHAVIOUR CHANGE Don't use the thumbnail as the avatar image
• Cover image will automatically be used as thumbnail if none is provided
• Image to share on social media will use the cover image or thumbnail if none is provided
• All images (social media share, thumbnail, cover) can use either relative or absoluate paths.
• Fixed issue where if a dropdown menu was the last item in the menu bar, it did not have a proper margin on the right
• Add social network links: Mastodon (#646), Google Scholar, ORCID (#670)
• Add support for sharing pages on new social network: VK (#657)
• Use Open Graph type 'article' for blog posts (#669)
• Use Twitter's large sumary card (large image) when there is a cover image, thumbnail image, or share image specified (#668)
• Make post images in the feed page smaller on smaller devices
• Fixed jQuery version in staticman (#671)

Beautiful Jekyll v3.0.0

• BREAKING CHANGE Upgraded from Bootstrap 3.3.2 to 4.4.1. This involved a major rewrite of most components. This shouldn't affect any users unless you have custom HTML/CSS code which the new Bootstrap could have broken.
• BREAKING CHANGE Renamed bigimg YAML parameter to cover-img.
• BREAKING CHANGE Removed googlefonts YAML parameter since googlefonts are just CSS so they can be loaded via ext-css.
• BREAKING CHANGE Upgraded from jQuery 1.11.2 to 3.4.2. This should not affect most people.
• Added navbar-border-col setting in the config file.
• Add accessibility features where possible.
• Made the theme completely responsive by rewriting all CSS to use 'rem' instead of 'px'.
• Rewrite and simplify some JavaScript code to use CSS or Bootstrap alternatives that weren't available in 2015.
• Remove most of the sample posts so that users only have two sample posts to learn from.
• Improvements to the README instructions.

Beautiful Jekyll v2.3.0

• Add YAML option footer-extra for including custom content in the footer
• Fix issue: linking to a specific part of a page resulted in scrolling too far (#69)
• Add YAML option nav-short to have navbar permanently collapsed
• Add social network link: Calendly
• Fix bug where RSS link in footer was showing even when turned off

v2.2.0

• Major documentation overhaul and cleanup of old files
• Add social network link: Telegram (#625) (thanks @mashed-potatoes)
• Moved the demo site to an independent URL: https://beautifuljekyll.com
• Fixes a small bug with staticman when using remote_them

v2.0.0

Stable version of beautiful jekyll, including remote_theme support and a ruby gem