This version has been in the works for a few years. It includes several new features that were highly requested, numerous bug fixes, new documentation, and aggresively encourages migrating from the old Google Universal Analytics to the new Analytics 4.

Breaking changes

• As of July 2023, Google Universal Analytics is going away and being replaced by Google Analytics 4. Beautiful Jekyll sites that still use the old analytics tag will show a warning to encourage them to move to Analytics 4 (#1096).
• More control over RSS feed sharing: previously, an RSS feed was always generated, and if the config setting rss-description was set then there was an RSS icon in the footer. Now, an RSS feed is only generated when the config setting rss-description exists, and an RSS footer icon is only shown if rss: true is set in the social-network-links config settings.

New parameters and settings

• Added navbar-var-length config setting that allows the navigation menu to be the same length as the longest sub-menu, so that long words in the submenu are not cut off (#765)
• Added post_search config setting that creates a Search button in the navbar (#770)
• Added edit_page_button config setting that adds a "Edit page" button to the footer (to edit the current page on GitHub) (#1004)
• Added footer-hover-col config setting to customize the hover colour of links in the footer (#848)

New features and improvements

• Made the home page feed more accessible for screen readers (#950)
• Added support for giscus comments (#886) and CommentBox (#960)
• Added support for Cloudflare Analytics (#797)
• Added Reddit in share options of posts (#815)

Bug fixes

• Fixed page titles, subtitles, and excerpts rendering correctly when there are special characeters in them (#856)
• Fixed bug where navbar secondary level dropdown items didn't inherit the same colour as the primary navbar links
• Fixed bug where the navbar "burger" collapsed button didn't always revert back to a light colour
• Fixed bug where using an image as a navbar title did not render in GitHub Project pages that did not have a custom domain
• Fixed bug where image thumbnails on the feed page were always forced into a square rather than maintaining a proper image aspect ratio
• Fixed bug where special characters in the title led to broken share tags (#744)
• Fixed bug where staticman didn't work jQuery slim version is used (#766)
• Fixed very long strings to wrap around the next line rather than go off-screen (#787)

Small changes

• Updated staticman from using v2 (public servers) to v3 (private servers) due to the public servers becoming obsolete (#775)
• Added social network links for Patreon, Medium, Itch.io, Discord, Kaggle, Hackerrank (#783, #788, #907, #961, #978)
• Slightly reworked margins and position for avatar image to resolve an alignment issue on Safari
• Changed the width at which the navbar collapses to a higher threshold because most modern non-mobile browsers are >1000px