Consistent case of URLs in Octopress

Question

I have my Octopress permalinks and category set as:

permalink: /blog/:categories/:title/
category_dir: blog

Examples _post/2013-05-20-BeefStew.markdown

---
layout: post
title: "Beef & Guinness Stew with Dumplings"
date: 2013-05-20 09:24
comments: true
categories: Cooking

The permalink for this page is /blog/Cooking/BeefStew/, the category page link is /blog/cooking/.

I would really like to get the category case consistent. How do I get the permalink to use a lowercase (downcase) of :categories?

I have tried making Octopress use the latest jekyll which I thought had downcased the full permalink but it broke the Octopress build process.

Also tried permalink: /blog/(:categories).downcase/:title/ but that just created links of /blog/(Cooking).downcase/BeefStew/.

Answer 1

Monkey patching the url used in Jekyll can achieve the required result.

# MonkeyPatch to lowercase (downcase) the URL
# Octopress (Jekyll 0.12.1)

module Jekyll
  class Post
    # Copy the #url method to #old_url, so we can redefine #url
    # method.
    alias_method :old_url, :url

    def url
      a = old_url.downcase
    end
  end
end

I have made this plugin available on Github, it will create urls which match:

Post URL : /blog/cooking/beefstew/
Category URL : /blog/cooking/.