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 search index from 11ty content

In order for a search to work, a search engine needs a set of data to work from. In this case, we need to create a search index for Algolia to create results based on searches. We can do this in a similar fashion to creating the RSS feed for the podcast in Chapter 7. Before we dive into code, let’s talk about what Algolia is.

What is Algolia?

Algolia is a software-as-a-service search provider. They provide powerful APIs to create and update a search index, as well as APIs and frontend libraries to build an end user experience. Their search solutions focus on website performance and search accuracy. By default, they have everything we need for a powerful and fast search. In this chapter, we’ll only scratch the surface of what Algolia provides with the following features:

  • API-driven index creation from JSON
  • Serverless access to search results
  • Automatic content snippets and highlights for results

Before...