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)

Understanding the difference between a page, template, and layout

One of 11ty’s strengths is also a source of confusion. 11ty comes bundled with 10 templating languages. These languages (including Liquid, Nunjucks, and Handlebars) can be used to create individual pages, includes, and layouts, and can be chained together to create complex systems. While this is incredibly powerful, it can create confusion around terminology.

The 11ty documentation says that layouts “are special templates that can be used to wrap other content.” This doesn’t necessarily clear things up. For this book, we’ll use the following definitions to try to keep things clear:

  • Page – an item meant to be rendered as a single URL on the final site, for example, index.html or about.html in this project
  • Layout – a file that is used by a page to wrap content in the entire structure for an HTML page
  • Include – a file consisting of a small, reusable...