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)

Why use a headless CMS with 11ty?

Markdown is great. I use Markdown in many projects, but it has its limits. When you start moving away from simple text-based content, the syntax becomes more problematic. Often, I find myself injecting HTML into my Markdown — which 11ty allows, by the way — and that ends up defeating the simplicity of Markdown. Add into the mix non-developers and even the simplicity of Markdown syntax is something that becomes a hurdle.

Beyond Markdown, frontmatter is a fine way of managing a small amount of data, but any level of complexity becomes a bit of a headache. A headless CMS can help us overcome both of these limitations.

What is a headless CMS?

You may be familiar with the concept of a content management system. It’s a place that stores data and content in an easily editable format. A traditional CMS typically has everything built in: an editing interface, a server-side language, and a way of building templates. This monolithic...