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)

Setting Up Your Website

At its core, Eleventy (11ty) is a simple concept. It takes a group of pages, data, and templates and combines them to create a static output – typically HTML – that can be served on a web server or distributed on a content delivery network (CDN). Tools that do this are typically referred to as static site generators (SSGs).

In this chapter, you’ll learn all you need to know to get your first simple 11ty website completed. In order to do this, we’ll talk a little bit about the history of static sites to uncover what makes 11ty special, as well as how to install and configure it on your computer to get moving in a simple, best-practice-focused structure. Every 11ty concept starts with the concepts in this chapter. This is what we will cover in this chapter:

  • What are static site generators and why are they important?
  • What is 11ty?
  • Running 11ty with no configuration
  • Configuring 11ty with basic best practices
  • ...