Happy weekend! To make your weekend all the better, we have just released v3.1.0 of Jekyll.

There are lots of great performance improvements, including a huge one which is to use Liquid drops instead of hashes. Much of the slowness in Jekyll is due to Jekyll making lots of objects it doesn’t need to make. By making these objects only as they’re needed, we can speed up Jekyll considerably!

Some other highlights:

• Fix: permalinks with non-HTML extensions will not be honored
• Fix: jekyll clean now accepts build flags like --source.
• Enhancement: include tags can now accept multiple liquid variables
• Feature: adds new sample liquid tag which gets random element from an array
• Fix: Jekyll will read in files with YAML front matter that has extraneous spaces after the first line
• Enhancement: extract the title attribute from the filename for collection items without a date
• Fix: gracefully handle empty configuration files

… and a whole bunch more!

Please file a bug if you encounter any issues! As always, Jekyll Talk is the best place to get help if you’re encountering a problem.

Special thanks to all our amazing contributors who helped make v3.1.0 a possibility:

Alex J Best, Alexander Köplinger, Alfred Xing, Alistair Calder, Atul Bhosale, Ben Orenstein, Chi Trung Nguyen, Conor O’Callaghan, Craig P. Motlin, Dan K, David Burela, David Litvak Bruno, Decider UI, Ducksan Cho, Florian Thomas, James Wen, Jordon Bedwell, Joseph Wynn, Kakoma, Liam Bowers, Mike Neumegen, Nick Quaranto, Nielsen Ramon, Olivér Falvai, Pat Hawks, Paul Robert Lloyd, Pedro Euko, Peter Suschlik, Sam Volin, Samuel Wright, Sasha Friedenberg, Tim Cuthbertson, Vincent Wochnik, William Entriken, Zshawn Syed, chrisfinazzo, ducksan cho, leethomas, midnightSuyama, musoke, and rebornix

Happy Jekylling!