Jekyll 3.5.2 is here

Recently GitHub Pages upgraded to Jekyll 3.5.2, and we’ve now made it our default to match.

This update includes a few enhancements and bug fixes, most notably one which should dramatically speed up generation of your site! In testing jekyllrb.com, generation went from 18 seconds down to 8.

For a full list of revisions check out the release notes.

If you are still using Jekyll 3.4, here’s everything that’s new in 3.5 so far:

  • Jekyll now uses Liquid 4, the latest! It comes with whitespace control, new filters concat and compact, loop performance improvements and many fixes.
  • Themes can specify dependencies and Jekyll will require those. This makes it easier for theme writers to use plugins.
  • The gems key in the _config.yml is now plugins. This is backwards-compatible, as Jekyll will gracefully upgrade gems to plugins if you use the former.
  • Filters like sort now allow you to sort based on a subvalue, e.g. {% assign sorted = site.posts | sort: "image.alt_text" %}.
  • You can now use tab-separated data files.
  • Using layout: none will now produce a file with no layout. Equivalent to layout: null, with the exception that none is a truthy value and won’t be overwritten by front matter defaults.
  • Dramatically faster site generation!
  • Lots more bug fixes.

For most sites, no action is required to take advantage of the latest version. As always, if you wish to use a different version of Jekyll for your site, you can define that in your Gemfile.

As a reminder, sites on our Team and higher plans can also use custom (non-whitelisted) gems. See learn.siteleaf.com for all the details.