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)

Summary

In this chapter, we tackled adding request-time data to a static website without the need for any frontend JavaScript. By using 11ty Serverless, we were able to use all of our hard-earned 11ty knowledge to build out HTML pages on the fly at request time. There was no need for annoying JavaScript templating or a deep understanding of the Node.js runtime.

We used the 11ty RSS plugin with a special permalink and two new custom 11ty filters to create a JSON file appropriate for sending to the search solution Algolia. We sent that off to Algolia via its API and used 11ty’s events functionality to resend it every time 11ty builds the site.

We then added a serverless route to our static site so that users could submit a search form and get dynamic content back. This route was built with 11ty’s standard templating and the bundled 11ty Serverless plugin. We then took the user input from the search field and sent a query to Algolia to get back properly formatted and...