Eleventy is a static site generator that's getting a lot more attention around the web lately. If you've tried it or considered trying it:
- Anything you're unsure about or wondering if it can do?
- Did you start an Eleventy project and get stuck on something?
Fine print: I'm the author of 11ty.Rocks so your responses may be used to help inform the creation of future resources 😉 I'd love to try to answer some of your questions in the comments, too!
Top comments (33)
I'm super happy to jump on the Eleventy bandwagon this year.
It serves my need, nothing overcomplicated or too big and it's still highly customizable.
Build my whole blog on top of it:
daily-dev-tips.com
I like 11ty for its flexibility and the fact that it's based on Node. I especially impressed by the capabilities of the collections API. The first thing I stumbled upon was preprocessing SASS which I eventually solved this way. I also tackle double layered pagination (as a challenge mainly) where I ended up with a proof of concept. I think that I like 11ty so much because it really allows full developpement freedom!
I didn’t realize Eleventy existed until seeing this post, though my experience with static site generators hasn’t been great so far. I suspect I am just using the tools wrong... thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I just tried 11ty this weekend just to see what it is all about. Tried it by myself, read a little bit of documentation and went through 2 'simple blog' tutorials linked in the docs.
Everything was good but something was missing, so I opened your Egghead tutorial on 11ty. It was more useful to me than all other things combined, especially stuff for input/output folders and sass (the whole .eleventy.js config file was just the thing I missed).
Your tutorial helped me to wrap my head around it and then I just tried to do my own thing, everything worked as swiss clock!
Thank you for making short, concise and free tutorial, it was very valuable source for me to learn 11ty fast.
edit: I am mainly using Gatsby, now I have 2 SSG that I like to use which is good and I can use them regarding the requirements and needs of the projects
Oh wow, I'm super happy to hear that, thank you so much for the feedback! And I'm glad you're on your way to using and enjoying Eleventy 💫
I was on the fence with last year around September mainly because of the way the documentation is set up but later in the year I found about your course on egghead.io plus the one from Khaled Garbaya. Now I think SSG is a pretty cool way to get a site started without all the bells & whistles of a JS framework.
Nothing. 11ty is super nice, I'm using it after the heavier Gatsby.
The only (small) problem is the lack of nice themes built on top, but pretty sure this gap will be filled in the next months.
P.S. 11ty.Rocks looks cool.
I’ve built a couple of projects with 11ty and I’m really impressed. It’s a great platform to work with, and very flexible.
It’s also easy enough for less experienced developers to get up an running quickly, and I have recommended it as an excellent first step for devs who want to build their first generated site.
I'm using Gridsome now but considering I've been having unexpected issues with running it locally I have considered an alternative to my site. It's just a matter of time really. Plus, I'd probably need to create my own theme.
I have been using Gatsby mostly.. What would you say is a good reason to go for 11ty instead?
If your output doesn't actually require features of React or if you do not need JavaScript (or minimally) then Eleventy is a great alternative. You can still write your files in Markdown or JavaScript, and you can organize your project similar to how you'd organize it for Gatsby. But Eleventy doesn't have the plugin dependency, you can start running it with no more than an index file using one of the 11 templating languages.
For me, simplicity is a big selling point. Gatsby is great, but plenty of sites don’t need that level of complexity.
11ty is also especially good if you have a range of experience levels in your dev team. Even relatively junior front end devs will be able to get their heads around 11ty much more easily than Gatsby.
It's definitely on my list for 2021!
Just waiting for an opportunity and some spare time. 👍
If you have 20 mins, you can get started with my egghead video course 😉
Nice! I'll go for it 😄
are there any "How to Build an 11ty Theme tutorials" on the web?
"Themes" aren't a foundational part of Eleventy like you might be familiar with for WordPress or Gatsby. With 11 languages to choose from, and being zero-config, there are a lot of opinions on how to put together an Eleventy project - you can customize it to precisely what you want! I have a written tutorial and a video tutorial available to help you get started on 11ty.Rocks. I'd also recommend Andy Bell's Learn Eleventy From Scratch (paid) course.
Thanks Stephanie. Your 11ty.Rocks website is AWESOME!
I have a 11ty site an its great.
🕷 akutidaktahu.netlify.app/
I even write an article series about it
🕷 epsi-rns.gitlab.io/ssg/2020/01/01/...
Nothing. 😉The same goes for all of these 😂😂
My familiarity with react and jsx has me lean towards things like next js or gatsby, but 11ty is on my radar, i do want to try it in the future.
I found 11ty after two years with React and Gatsby and was able to re-use a lot of my mental models and mold 11ty to fit my preferred organization pattern, which I appreciated vs. Gatsby. It also doesn't rely on plugins, but gives you full flexibility to create your own functionality using anything from packages or hand-rolled JS 🙌🏽
I've used it before for some small projects, and I wouldn't use it again because of how hard it is to use tools like bundlers.
That being said, I love almost every part of it, but still I like to use bundlers.
I recently used this starter that includes Parcel and it was a brilliant experience and provided exactly what I wanted out of a bundler alongside Eleventy:
eleventy-parcel starter on GitHub
If you're interested in what it was used for, it was to create my web app ButtonBuddy.dev