Getting Started with Minimal Mistakes

This is a quick start guide to help you get up and running with the Minimal Mistakes theme.

When you first start your Jekyll site, you will have a default layout and some sample content. This guide will help you understand how to customize your site and make it your own.

Configuration

The configuration file for your Jekyll site is located in the _config.yml file. Here you can update the site title, description, and other settings:

title: My Jekyll Site
description: A simple Jekyll site using the Minimal Mistakes theme.

Full list of site settings can be found in the Configuration section of the Minimal Mistakes documentation.

Home

The home page is the first page that visitors see when they visit your site.

By default, the home page is set to display a list of your latest posts. You can change this by modifying the _pages/home.md file. For example, to update the layout to single and add a title:

---
layout: single
title: Home
permalink: /
author_profile: true
---

  Sample content for my home page. You may include the content of `README.md`

Posts

You probably want to delete the sample posts that come with the theme:

• _posts/2019-04-18-welcome-to-jekyll.md
• _posts/2010-03-07-post-link.md
• etc.

You can do this by deleting the files in the_posts directory.

See the Working with Posts for more information on how to create and manage posts.

Navigation

The Navigation menu is located in the _data/navigation.yml file. You can add, remove, or modify the links in this file to customize the navigation menu on your site.

For example, remove the “Categories” and “Tags” links from the navigation menu by deleting the following lines from the _data/navigation.yml file:

  - title: "Categories"
    url: /categories/
  - title: "Tags"
    url: /tags/

Pages

To better organize all of your pages it’s recommended to centralize them into a single location _pages/. You can create a new page by creating a new file in the _pages directory.

See Working with Pages documentation for more information on how to create and manage pages.

Collections

Collections are a way to group related content together. For example, you might want to create a collection for all your How-to Guides within the Diataxis framework.

To create a new guides collection, you need to add a new entry to the _config.yml file:

collections:
  guides:
    output: true
    permalink: /:collection/:path/

These settings will output index.html files for each document in _guides at _site/guides/<document-filename>/.

Set some defaults for the Front Matter of the documents in the guides collection:

defaults:
  # _guides
  - scope:
      path: ""
      type: guides
    values:
      layout: single
      author_profile: false
      share: true

You can now create a new file guides.md in the _pages directory to list all the guides in the collection.

---
title: Guides
layout: collection
permalink: /guides/
collection: guides
entries_layout: grid
classes: wide
---

And then create a how-to guide _guides/mm-quick-start.md with content like:

---
title: Minimal Mistakes Quick-Start guide
---

This is a demo of a Quick-Start Guide with single page layout using the Minimal Mistakes theme.

See Working with Collections for more information on how to create and manage collections.

Custom sidebar navigation menu

Create a custom sidebar navigation menu for the documents of a collection by adding a new entry to the _data/navigation.yml file. For example, to create a custom sidebar navigation menu for the guides collection, add the following entry:

docs:
  - title: Guides
    children:
      - title: "Quick-Start Guide"
        url: /guides/mm-quick-start/

Use Front Matter Defaults in _config.yml to add a sidebar navigation menu to several pages

    defaults:
      # _guides
      - scope:
          path: ""
          type: guides
        values:
          layout: single
          author_profile: false
          share: true
          sidebar:
            nav:
              - docs

See Custom sidebar navigation menu for more details