In Jekyll, how do I render custom metadata for a collection? - jekyll

Question

I have the following in my _config.yml file:
collections:
nr_qa:
output: true
permalink: /:collection/:name
title: 'Node-RED Questions and Answers'
descriptions: 'Node-RED is a flow-based (visual) programming tool. These pages have some information that may be currently missing from the documentaiton.'
github_pages:
title: 'GitHub Pages and Jekyll/Liquid'
description: 'Hints and tips on using Jekyll for publishing to GitHub Pages.'
output: true
permalink: /:collection/:name
and I want to create an automatic index for my collections. So I use code like this:
## {{ site.collections.github_pages.title }}
{{ site.collections.github_pages.description }}
<ul>
{% for item in site.github_pages %}
<li>
{{ item.title | replace:'_',' ' }}
<p>{% if item.description %}
{{ item.description }}
{% else %}
{{ item.excerpt | strip_html }}
{% endif %}</p>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
And yes, I know I've rather mixed up my markdown and html there. Not relevant to this question.
The problem is that {{ site.collections.github_pages.title }} and {{ site.collections.github_pages.description }} don't render anything even though I think they should.
Can anyone point out my mistake please?

Answer 1

The problem is that title and description should be included in each collection, and not in _config.yml.
Check out Accessing Collection AttributesPermalink for further details.
update
title can be present in each collection metadata in _config.yml. The problem is how you are accessing those variables.
One approach is to have a specific layout for each collection, then you can access them like:
{% assign col = site.collections | where: 'label','github_pages' | first%}.
TITLE: {{ col.title }}.
DESCRIPTION: {{ col.description }}.