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 is an 11ty plugin?

The word plugin is loaded with context and history. Many systems have implemented a plugin architecture for making changes to the core functionality of a product. Everything from web browsers to desktop applications to content management systems has something they call plugins, each with a variable amount of power over the core software.

The 11ty website defines plugins slightly differently:

“Plugins are custom code that Eleventy can import into a project from an external repository.”

This still doesn’t quite clear up what an 11ty plugin is.

At its base, an 11ty plugin is a portable configuration that can be added to an 11ty project. What this means is that anything that you can do within the 11ty configuration file, a plugin can do and be added to your project. This includes things such as shortcodes, filters, global data, data transformations, and more.

What this means for our project is that we can pick up the custom functionality...