Frontmatter

Frontmatter allows page-specific variables to be included at the top of a template using the YAML or JSON format.

YAML Frontmatter

Let's take a simple ERB template, adding some frontmatter variables to change the layout for this specific page.

--- layout: "custom" title: "My Title" my_list: - one - two - three --- <h1>List</h1> <ol> <% current_page.data.my_list.each do |f| %> <li><%= f %></li> <% end %> </ol> 

Frontmatter must come at the very top of the template and be separated from the rest of the content by a leading and trailing triple hyphen ---. Inside this block, you can create new data which will be available in the template using the current_page.data hash, e.g. title: "My Title" becomes current_page.data.title. The layout setting will pass directly to Middleman and change which layout is being used for rendering. You can also set ignored, directory_index, and some other page properties in this way.

JSON Frontmatter

You can also use JSON for your frontmatter. It's delimited by ;;; and looks like this:

;;; "layout": "custom", "my_list": [ "one", "two", "three" ] ;;; 

After that, it can be used exactly the same as YAML frontmatter in your page.