Please help me! I want to keep it SIMPLE & use a database/csv/excel file & html page template to create a static website

Ok everyone, I am really really really hoping this is the final spot for me asking this question. My requirements are SOOOOOO simple. ALL I want to do in theory is create a basic HTML “template” for a page … and then dynamically create other pages using a VERY simple database or csv or excel file!

So for example, lets say I want to make a site that shows a team of NBA players.

The only real tasks I want to do is to create the profile page … and then just fill in the data!

So for example I would have a page that looked like.

<html>
{{page-url}}
{{name}}
{{photo}}
{{about}}
</html>

THEN I would just go into my csv file or excel or database and start typing in the values. Each row would be a different player…

I would then want the program to automatically create the pages for each player and just display the corresponding information.

IS THIS POSSIBLE WITH JEKYLL?!?!?!?!

I’ve been asking everywhere and cannot get a good answer. This seems so simple to do but I’m not a hardcore programmer.

jekyll can’t make new pages - you can do what you want by looping over the data on one page to make one long page with all the profiles, but it won’t make a new page for each profile.

Jekyll won’t do it, but you could probably do it with JS, Jekyll could take in your csv and then convert it into a json file, and then JS could take that and do all kinds of things with it. But you would need to do the JS bit, and that would require you to know a fair amount of JS.

If you were able to have separate files you could do it with collections easily enough, but it would be a separate file for each profile which is probably not what you want.

at this point i am literally open to any possible solution using any possible programming language. knowing the limit of one, and where another must take part is fine.

i like what you said about the JS …

Hi @paul,
@pabloduo and me have built this plugin: jekyll-autoscout24, a bridge between a backup XML file and a Jekyll site. It also works with Github pages!

Take a look at this plugin, it might fit your needs:

1 Like

Thanks for pointing out this very useful jekyll plugin. It worked like a charm!

The Jekyll docs cover a Generator plugin which can create pages based on data in say a data file (CSV, YAML or JSON file in _data.

A collection or plain pages also works where each page gets made into a page. The data can be in the frontmatter and you can add a CMS like Forestry or Netlify CMS so one can edit the data and create pages using a neat UI without editing code or excel file directly.

For a simpler case of iterating over data and displaying a table, see this tutorial I wrote.