eleventy-base-blog

A starter repository showing how to build a (multi-language friendly) blog with the Eleventy static site generator.

Demos

• Netlify
• GitHub Pages
• Remix on Glitch

Deploy this to your own site

Deploy this Eleventy site in just a few clicks on these services:

• Get your own Eleventy web site on Netlify
• Get your own Eleventy web site on Vercel

Or, read more about Deploying an Eleventy project.

Getting Started

1. Clone this Repository

git clone https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog.git my-blog-name

2. Navigate to the directory

cd my-blog-name

Specifically have a look at .eleventy.js to see if you want to configure any Eleventy options differently.

3. Install dependencies

npm install

4. Edit _data/metadata.json

5. Run Eleventy

npx @11ty/eleventy

Or build and host locally for local development

npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

Or in debug mode:

DEBUG=Eleventy* npx @11ty/eleventy

Implementation Notes

• en is the folder for content (written using the primary language for project, here we’re using English)
• en/about/index.md is an example of an English content page.
• en/blog/ has the English blog posts but really they can live in any directory. They need only the post tag to be included in the blog posts collection.
  • To localize a blog post you will need to add a top level folder for that language (es for Spanish, ja for Japanese, en-us for American English) and match the rest of the file path to the primary language folder. For example en/blog/my-post.md could have ja/blog/my-post.md or es/blog/my-post.md. Read more about best practices for organizing files for internationalization (i18n) in Eleventy projects.
• Use the eleventyNavigation key in your front matter to add a template to the top level site navigation. For example, this is in use on index.njk and about/index.md.
  • This makes use of the Eleventy Navigation plugin
• Content can be any template format (blog posts needn’t be markdown, for example). Configure your supported templates in .eleventy.js -> templateFormats.
• The public folder in your input directory will be copied to the output folder (via addPassthroughCopy() in the .eleventy.js file). This means ./public/css/* will live at ./_site/css/* after your build completes. When using --serve this behavior is emulated (the files will not show up in _site).
• The blog post feed template is in feed/feed.njk. This is also a good example of using a global data files in that it uses _data/metadata.json.
• This project uses three layouts:
  • _includes/layouts/base.njk: the top level HTML structure
  • _includes/layouts/home.njk: the home page template (wrapped into base.njk)
  • _includes/layouts/post.njk: the blog post template (wrapped into base.njk)
• _includes/postslist.njk is a Nunjucks include and is a reusable component used to display a list of all the posts. index.njk has an example of how to use it.