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 reusable includes

While the base layout is more maintainable, we can make it easier to reconfigure by breaking the layout down into smaller pieces called includes. These includes will be the beginning of taking the code and turning them into building blocks that can be remixed into different layouts as necessary.

To start, we need to identify the smaller pieces of the base template. Let’s create a header.html file in the src/_templates/includes directory and move all the HTML meta information and visible site header into that file. Everything from the DOCTYPE element to the header element should be removed from base.html and moved into the new file.

While we’re refactoring the header, let’s also move the <nav> element into its own include, as well. 11ty templates can be nested. This means we can include files inside other files. In this case, the header.html include can include navigation.html.

Create a navigation.html file in the includes...