As a static website generator, Jekyll doesn't support using a real database. But Jekyll supports loading data from YAML, JSON, and CSV files located in the _data directory under the root of website source code.
With help of these data files, we can create our own some kind of fake database to avoid many repetitive works in our code and seperate real contents from website's code.
I picked YAML as the data file's format. Here is an example:
File name:members.yml
- name: Christophe Prudhomme
github: prudhomm
bio: Professor in Scientifc Computing
place: Strasbourg
- name: Vincent Chabannes
github: vincentchabannes
bio: Research Engineer
place: Grenoble
- name: Vincent Huber
github: vhuber
bio: Research Engineer
place: Strasbourg
- name: Matthieu Boileau
github: boileaum
bio: Research Engineer
place: Strasbourg
- name: Alexandre Ancel
github: aancel
bio: Research Engineer
place: Strasbourg
A list of professors is built, the following code snippet can access this list:
{% for member in site.data.members %}
//each member contains the informations from name to place
//do something wuth member
{% endfor %}
An real implentation of professor and his courses is included in Appendix/Jekyll Tips And Tricks chapter.