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)

Creating the base layout file

Up to this point, everything we’ve accomplished with 11ty can be replicated in other, smaller tools. Removing the basic HTML boilerplate from each page makes the code much more maintainable and extensible.

To start, we need a new subdirectory in the src directory. Name this directory _templates. By default, 11ty uses an _includes directory for includes and layouts. To avoid semantic confusion, we’ll update our configuration to use the new directory instead.

A note on directory naming

It’s perfectly fine to use the default folder names. Most of my 11ty projects use the _includes naming convention. This step is more for clarity than best practices.

In the configuration function’s return statement, update the dir object to include an includes property:

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
    // Copy `assets/` to `_site/assets/`
    eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy...