Implementing a glossary in Jekyll - jekyll

Question

Am porting a doc site from Madcap Flare to GitHub Pages using Jekyll. One thing I'm wondering about is that is there a way of implementing an automatic glossary similar to Flare's:
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/blog/guest-post-madcap-flare-101-7-the-glossary/
In summary: I want to have a glossary file comprised of terms and definitions. Then if a term occurs in a topic, it automatically becomes a link or pop-up link to the definition.
If anyone has done this or knows a way to do it I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible. Pop-over elements are also possible but I have chosen the link example.
This plugin can create links to the glossary:
module GlossaryData
def glossary
self['glossary']
end
end
module Jekyll
class GlossaryLinkGenerator < Generator
def generate(site)
site.data.extend(GlossaryData)
glossary_terms = {}
site.data.glossary.each do |entry|
glossary_terms[entry['term'].downcase] = entry['definition']
glossary_terms[entry['term']] = entry['definition']
end
# pages
site.pages.each do |page|
glossary_terms.each do |term, definition|
page.content = page.content.gsub(term) do |match|
"<a href='/glossary.html##{term}'>#{term}</a>"
end
end
end
# posts
site.posts.docs.each do |post|
glossary_terms.each do |term, definition|
post.content = post.content.gsub(term) do |match|
"<a href='/glossary.html##{term}'>#{term}</a>"
end
end
end
# Notes
# For all content, use site.documents instead of the two code blocks for posts and pages above
# The site.documents attribute is an array of all the documents in your site,
# including pages, posts, and any other collections that you have defined in your configuration.
# You can use this attribute if you want to apply the glossary link generator to all types of documents in your site.
# You can also use site.collections[COLLECTION_NAME].docs if you want to apply it to a specific collection of documents.
# Just replace COLLECTION_NAME with the name of the collection you want to use.
# You can also use site.collections['posts'].docs for the posts instead of site.posts.
# site.collections is a hash of all the collections defined in your site's configuration,
# and each collection has a 'docs' attribute that returns an array of all the documents in the collection.
# This is useful if you want to apply the glossary link generator to a collection other than 'posts',
# or if you want to apply it to multiple collections.
end
end
end
Define your glossary in _data/glossary.yml:
- term: Jekyll
definition: A static site generator written in Ruby.
- term: Liquid
definition: A template language used by Jekyll to generate dynamic content.
- term: Markdown
definition: A lightweight markup language used to format plain text.
The test page to see that the glossary is working:
---
layout: post
---
jekyll or Jekyll? Both are matched due to downcasing.