Aloha Jekyllers!!

After months of toiling on the codebase and shipping a couple of release-candidates, the Jekyll Team is delighted to finally present v3.8.0, packed with optimizations, improvements, some new features and a couple of bug-fixes. Yay!!!

Under the hood, Jekyll has undergone many minor changes that will allow it to run more performantly in the coming years. Rest assured, our users should see minor improvements in their site’s build times.

Speaking of improvements, users running a site containing a huge amount of posts or those who like to use our where filter frequently in a single template, are going to see a massive reduction in their total build times!!

Hold on, this version is not just about optimizations, there are some new features as well..:

• Detect non-existent variables and filters specified in a template by enabling strict_variables and strict_filters under the liquid key in your config file.
• Allow date filters to output ordinal days.
• jekyll doctor now warns you if you have opted for custom collections_dir but placed _posts directory outside that directory.

..and yes, a couple of bug-fixes, notably:

• Jekyll now handles future-dated documents properly.
• Jekyll is able to handle Liquid blocks intelligently in excerpts.
• A few methods that were not meant to be publically accessible have been entombed properly.
• A few bugs that still plagued our collections_dir feature from v3.7 got crushed.

As always, the full list of changes since last release can be viewed here.

A big thanks to the following people who contributed to our repository with pull-requests that improved our codebase, documentation and tests:

Ana María Martínez Gómez, Antonio Argote, Ashwin Maroli, Awjin Ahn, Ben Balter, Benjamin Høegh, Christian Oliff, Damien Solodow, David Zhang, Delson Lima, Eric Cornelissen, Florian Thomas, Frank Taillandier, Heinrich Hartmann, Jakob Vad Nielsen, John Eismeier, Kacper Duras, KajMagnus, Mario Cekic, Max Vilimpoc, Michael H, Mike Kasberg, Parker Moore, Pat Hawks, Paweł Kuna, Robert Riemann, Roger Rohrbach, Semen Zhydenko, Stefan Dellmuth, Tim Carry, olivia, and steelman.

Happy Jekylling!!