Working with Collections

Collections are the heart of Kiln. They organize your content into logical groups with consistent structure, metadata, and rendering.

What is a Collection?

A collection is a directory of content items (Markdown files) that share:

• A common location (e.g., content/posts/)
• Consistent Frontmatter structure
• Shared layout template
• Optional sorting and pagination rules

Built-in Collections

Kiln includes two default collections:

Posts Collection

collections:
                  posts:
                    directory: content/posts
                    permalink: /blog/:slug/
                    sort: date desc
                    layout: post
                    paginate: 10
                

Posts are sorted by date (newest first), paginated at 10 items per page, and rendered with the post.html layout.

Pages Collection

collections:
                  pages:
                    directory: content/pages
                    permalink: /:slug/
                    sort: weight asc
                    layout: page
                

Pages are sorted by weight (Frontmatter field), allowing you to control menu order.

Creating Custom Collections

You can create as many collections as you need. Example:

collections:
                  projects:
                    directory: content/projects
                    permalink: /portfolio/:slug/
                    layout: project
                    taxonomies:
                      - technologies
                      - year
                

Each item in the collection becomes a page with its own URL and can be listed on category pages.

Collection Metadata

Every item in a collection automatically gets:

• url: The generated URL
• slug: URL-friendly name
• content: Rendered HTML
• title, date, tags: Custom Frontmatter
• collection: The collection name

This metadata is available in templates for navigation, related posts, and more.

Accessing Collections

In Kiln templates, you can iterate over collections:

{% for post in collections.posts %}
                  <article>
                    <h2><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></h2>
                    <time>{{ post.date }}</time>
                  </article>
                {% endfor %}
                

Collections make it easy to build blogs, portfolios, documentation sites, and more!