Book Image

Eleventy By Example

By : Bryan Robinson
Book Image

Eleventy By Example

By: Bryan Robinson

Overview of this book

11ty is the dark horse of the Jamstack world, offering unparalleled flexibility and performance that gives it an edge against other static site generators such as Jekyll and Hugo. With it, developers can leverage the complete Node ecosystem and create blazing-fast, static-first websites that can be deployed from a content delivery network or a simple server. This book will teach you how to set up, customize, and make the most of 11ty in no time. Eleventy by Example helps you uncover everything you need to create your first 11ty website before diving into making more complex sites and extending 11ty’s base functionality with custom short codes, plugins, and content types. Over the course of 5 interactive projects, you’ll learn how to build basic websites, blogs, media sites, and static sites that will respond to user input without the need for a server. With these, you’ll learn basic 11ty skills such as templates, collections, and data use, along with advanced skills such as plugin creation, image manipulation, working with a headless CMS, and the use of the powerful 11ty Serverless plugin. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to leverage the capabilities of 11ty by implementing best practices and reusable techniques that can be applied across multiple projects, reducing the website launch time.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

What are static site generators and why are they important?

SSGs have been around since early in the history of web development with systems such as HSC (which stands for HTML Sucks Completely) and Movable Type looking to solve the sometimes problematic developer experience of authoring plain HTML for multi-page sites. These technologies added features such as includes and macros that made creating and maintaining HTML websites much easier.

The other direction development began to move in was rendering templates on the server instead of serving simple HTML back per request. The upside to this was a strong developer experience and the ability to create pages dynamically. Templates were created and uploaded to a server and when a request came from a client, the pages’ HTML was built and sent to the client. This methodology would become the predominant authoring experience for the web over the next decade. With it came longer load times.

SSGs would see a boost in 2008 with...