Ease adding scripts that depend on jQuery

[mjpieters]

It's currently very cumbersome to add scripts to the theme that must load in the footer to benefit from the jQuery support already present. Either we must

• list main.min.js and https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.7.1/js/all.js (but without the defer, integrity and crossorigin options), or
• customise the scripts.html include, or
• copy across all JS assets, download the package.json and banner.js files from GitHub (using the right versions) to be able to build the asset locally.

Yet all I want to do is load one extra, small JS file to handle contact form submission with AJAX and some validation..

Please add a simple option to load additional scripts in the footer, in addition to main.min.js and font-awesome. Perhaps a extra_scripts list?

[mmistakes]

The default layout almost never changes (aside from bumping a theme version number in comments) and is therefore safe for overriding.

You could add your script here by copying _layouts/default.html to your repo and override the bundled one.

[mjpieters]

Right, that's another work-around then. Not ideal, not when adding additional scripts in the footer would be fairly common, I think?

[mmistakes]

Which is where footer_scripts or overriding _includes/footer/custom.html come into play.

[mjpieters]

But neither footer_scripts nor _includes/footers/custom.html let me place an extra script tag after the existing scripts (so after jQuery and magnific-popup have been loaded).

[mmistakes]

Have a look at PR #2116 and let me know if this meets your need.
You can test by using this gem in your Gemfile

gem 'minimal-mistakes-jekyll', :git => 'https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes.git', :branch => 'after-footer-scripts'

And then adding your "after footer" script paths to _config.yml like so:

after_footer_scripts:
  - /assets/js/custom-script-loads-after-footer.js

[mjpieters]

This is absolutely perfect. It fits my needs exactly, I no longer would need to customise the default.html layout or scripts.html include.