Feature: Include _data from theme in sites that use the theme

[hblankenship]

Not being able to have the _data/ collections in a remote theme be accessible to sites that use the theme is problematic.

There are useful collections that one might consider putting in a remote theme and using across many repositories (the owasp foundation website https://owasp.org is a collection of repositories making up one website). Such data might include a default menu system for all sites that resides in the header or a default set of corporate supporters to display in a footer.

I propose that any collection that exists in a _data folder in the remote theme be accessible via sites that use the theme. Further, in case of name collisions, if the site implementing the remote theme uses a data collection of the same name then the remote theme's version of the collection is replaced by the site's version. This functionality is available in a ruby gem for gem themes and would be useful here.

Currently the alternative to this is to put data in a separate folder in a json file and load the json file via javascript in the remote theme. This workaround assumes the use of javascript and we would like to avoid requiring js.

[delisma]

This feature could be useful for i18n and/or l10n, when building multilingual theme and the 118n strings sits in _data folder. In case of conflicts the files in _data can always be overridden like the _includes and _laytouts folders are.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[mgerzabek]

In these days we have hundreds of tracking services, marketing automation services, form frameworks, etc. that all require a couple of paragraphs in a GDPR statement. It’s the obligation of a consumer project to gather these semi-legal pieces of information and to put them into a privacy statement.

Instead of putting these text modules into a privacy page itself I propose to put them into a catalogue in the data folder of a theme.

This way a kind of micro MVC pattern could be implemented by offering a specialized layout in combination with a page that extends this layout. The data file would become the model, the layout the view and the page on the consumer project the controller.

As @benbalter tagged this issue to be a good first issue I implemented the additions to his plugin in #89 and an implementation of the pattern in my first remote theme https://github.com/storyfaktor/klartext.

model: _data/datenschutz.json
view: _layouts/datenschutz.html

controller: Any page which utilizes the layout from the remote_theme. In the frontmatter boolean switches control which text modules get included in rendering.

Reviews welcomed.

GitHub

storyfaktor/klartext

Ein Jekyll Theme für EPUs, Brainworker (Berater, Trainer und Coaches), Content Marketer, Autoren, Wissenschafter und Schreibwütige. - storyfaktor/klartext