jekyll archives is annoying

jekyll-archives is annoying. While I think it does a lot of great things, it is missing a key functionality that would make it awesome.

Right now, the way jekyll-archives works is you can add the following archive categories to your _config.yml. Here is what the documentation suggests:

jekyll-archives:
  enabled: []
  layout: archive
  permalinks:
    year: "/:year/"
    month: "/:year/:month/"
    day: "/:year/:month/:day/"
    tag: "/tag/:name/"
    category: "/category/:name/"

My own configuration is very similar, following the docs percisely:

jekyll-archives:
  enabled: [year, tags, categories]
  layouts:
    year: archive-year
    tag: archive-tag
    category: archive-category
  permalinks:
    year: "/blog/:year/"
    tag: "/blog/tag/:name/"
    category: "/blog/category/:name/"

Pretty simple right? Wrong.

I thought it would be a good idea to add a custom category, authors. While its just me writing on the blog, I wanted to be able to support other authors writing on the blog, and then being able to filter posts by author.

In my head, I thought the following would easily add an authors category ¹.

jekyll-archives:
  enabled: [year, tags, categories, authors]
  layouts:
    year: archive-year
    tag: archive-tag
    category: archive-category
    author: archive-author
  permalinks:
    year: "/blog/:year/"
    tag: "/blog/tag/:name/"
    category: "/blog/category/:name/"
    author: "/blog/author/:name/"

After adding this to _conig.yml, I encountered no errors in running the site, and I began setting up my blog.md file to begin solidyfing the authors functionality. However, when I visited the /blog/author/andrew-boyer location, it did not exist! ².

I came to the frustrating realization that those fields are hardcoded into the library and custom categories cannot be added. Seems like it would be a simple thing to do?

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DEFAULTS = {
"layout" => "archive",
"enabled" => [],
"permalinks" => {
"year" => "/:year/",
"month" => "/:year/:month/",
"day" => "/:year/:month/:day/",
"tag" => "/tag/:name/",
"category" => "/category/:name/",
},
}.freeze