Add support for page.description in front matter to become entry <summary>

[mohd-akram]

Closes #216.

[DirtyF]

Great addition! Thanks @mohd-akram

[parkr]

I’m not sure I understand why you would use a different field here, namely why you would use description instead of excerpt. Jekyll allows you to overwrite excerpt in front matter, so why not just overwrite the excerpt for the post or page in question?

[mohd-akram]

I use description because it's supported by jekyll-seo-tag (see the issue above) and because overriding excerpt feels weird. title and description together are also analogous to their HTML counterparts.

[benbalter]

👋😄 I came here to request the same feature.

Since Jekyll SEO Tag supports title + description, I add short 1-2 sentence descriptions to each post which serve as a concise summary of the post's content. By using excerpt and only excerpt, Jekyll Feed either only outputs the post body up to the first line break or requires site maintainers to duplicate summaries across both the excerpt and description fields for all posts.

👍 to preferring description if it's present to bring things a bit closer in line with the way Jekyll SEO Tag treats front matter.

[parkr]

jekyll-seo-tag has a field called "description" which uses page.description then page.excerpt and finally falls back to the site description:

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-seo-tag/blob/c658a8dd9d94520c090547b164e643441df8e62f/lib/jekyll-seo-tag/drop.rb#L90-L94

[parkr]

@jekyllbot: merge +minor