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 a Static-Site Search with 11ty Serverless and Algolia

Accepting user input on a static site is a tricky topic. It’s one of the main arguments against the idea of the Jamstack. When all you have is a server that sends HTML and no server-side processing, accepting user input usually ends up relying on client-side code to fill any need for user input. Patterns such as adding comments, like buttons, and search engines are all often dependent on frontend solutions.

While these frontend solutions work, they can often lead to gaps in accessibility, site performance, or search engine optimization. Since they rely on JavaScript, any system that doesn’t support JavaScript or doesn’t fully support it will not be able to access these solutions. For instance, Algolia has truly amazing and easy-to-use JavaScript libraries to provide powerful search features for a website. However, if a user doesn’t have access to JavaScript, they get no search functionality...