Proper Rendering of Posts by Tag and By Author in Octopress

Octopress generates per-tag indexes that show only the post title by default. This works fine until you customize category_index.html to output a post content excerpt too—then the content renders incorrectly.

This is a problem in the plugins/category_generator.rb plugin.

In both of these plugins, one can find the code:

index = CategoryIndex.new(self, self.source, category_dir, category)
index.render(self.layouts, site_payload)
index.write(self.dest)
# Record the fact that this page has been added, otherwise Site::cleanup will remove it.
self.pages << index

index = CategoryIndex.new(self, self.source, category_dir, category)
index.render(self.layouts, site_payload)
index.write(self.dest)
# Record the fact that this page has been added, otherwise Site::cleanup will remove it.
self.pages << index

This code is wrong. The Jekyll engine has different phases for page generation (e.g., reset, read, generate, render, cleanup, and write), each run across all pages. But Jekyll plugins should only override the generate phase—the rest should be handled by the engine itself.

In the code above, the plugin tries to handle the generate, render, and write phases during generation — this is wrong. The plugin should only do the generate phase; the rest are handled by the Jekyll engine.

The bug fix is very simple: just remove or comment out all occurrences of the lines below in the category_generator.rb and author_generator.rb plugins.

index.render(self.layouts, site_payload)
index.write(self.dest)

index.render(self.layouts, site_payload)
index.write(self.dest)

This will fix all the rendering issues.