We’re excited to share some recent improvements to GitHub Pages, which you may have already noticed rolling out over the past several weeks:

Additional metadata for organization pages

Many large organizations like Adobe, Netflix, and The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau use GitHub Pages to showcase their open source efforts. We’ve just made it easier to create beautiful pages for you and your projects by exposing additional project and organization metadata to the site.github namespace:

  • contributors – A list of your project’s contributors, as returned through the contributors API
  • public_repositories – A list of your public repositories as returned from the repositories list API
  • organization_members – A list of your organization’s public members as returned from the organization members API

Each of these new elements expose complete user/repository objects to Jekyll, and can eliminate the need for making client-side API calls when showcasing your open source efforts on GitHub. For more information on displaying metadata within your Jekyll site, see Repository metadata on GitHub Pages.

Sitemaps

We recently open-sourced and white-listed the jekyll-sitemap plugin. By simply adding the plugin to your site’s config file, Jekyll will automatically generate a sitemaps.org-compliant sitemap, making it easier for search engines to index your site’s content. For more information, see Sitemaps for GitHub Pages.

Better build feedback

You may have already noticed that following some successful builds you may receive a warning email with helpful feedback about CNAME errors, upgrading your Markdown interpreter, or ensuring your custom domain is properly configured.

Additionally, if your page build does fail, we’ll provide you with a link to an error-specific help article so that you can get the problem sorted out in no time.

PageBuild events

A few weeks ago we introduced the PageBuild webhook. If you subscribe to the page_build event, we’ll ping your application with the result of your site’s build following each push. You can use this information to better integrate GitHub Pages with your current development workflow.

Happy documenting!