Create a collection

On the previous page, we learned how to configure LumeCMS to edit a single file. This is useful if the file is unique, but not very practical if you have many files with the same structure.

For example, let's say you have a blog with many posts and you want to edit them. Using cms.document() wouldn't be very practical because you would need to set up a new document for each post. What we need is to create a collection.

Creating a collection

A collection is a group of documents with the same structure. Creating a collection is very similar to creating a single document, but uses the cms.collection() function.

Let's see an example of a post:

---
title: Static site generators are cool!
author: Óscar Otero
tags:
  - lume
  - ssg
---

I like static site generators because they are fast, flexible, and fun to work with.

Following this example, all our posts will have a title, an author, a list of tags, and the content in Markdown. So this is an example of a collection:

cms.collection("Posts", "src:posts/*.md", [
  "title: text",
  "author: text",
  "tags: list",
  "content: markdown",
]);

As you can see, the arguments passed to the cms.collection() function are the same as when we created the document for the homepage. We only need the name of the collection, the location to store the documents, and the fields with the data structure.

Because the location is not a single file, but a collection of files, we can use a glob. src:posts/*.md means that our collection is stored in the posts folder inside the src directory, in files with the .md extension. Any file with a different extension is not part of our collection.

Now run deno task cms to see the new "Posts" section in the main menu. You can create new documents (posts) and remove or edit the existing ones!