Issue 39 - Another canary, Netlify redirects in your front matter, a speedlify question, just an index.md...And 5 posts and 4 sites to see.

Apr 16, 2024

3 minutes to read

Welcome to Issue 39 of the 11ty Bundle. 11ty, aka Eleventy, is a static site generator that is designed to be simple, flexible, and highly customizable. It is built on Node.js and allows developers to create websites by transforming templates and data into static HTML files. It supports multiple templating languages, including HTML, Markdown, Nunjucks, Liquid, and more, which gives developers the freedom to choose the languages they are most comfortable with or that best suit their project's needs.

The email version of this blog is rocking the house! The subscriber count has reached double digits (yes, more than 10)...exceeding expectations. You can subscribe here.

There's a new canary among us Eleventy canary v3.0.0-alpha.6 was released last week. It incorporates the Virtual Templates that I mentioned last week. And there's an update to how directory references work in the context of Virtual Templates. If you have not yet tested your site with the canary releases of 3.0, here's how you can.

Define Netlify redirect rules in your templates' front matter Using the new Virtual Templates in 3.0.0-alpha.6, Aleksandr Hovhannisyan created eleventy-plugin-netlify-redirects to do just that. In the README, he notes his motivation: "You can define Netlify redirect rules by hand, but this requires keeping the new/current URL up to date and in sync with your template files' slugs/permalinks. If you change a template file name multiple times, that becomes a headache to manage. This plugin allows you to define your redirect rules right inside your templates' front matter; the new/current URL is always page.url." I expect that there will be more interesting use cases for this new capability.

Speedlify and the Leaderboards A comment came up on the Discord server recently noting that there had been no mention of how often the Eleventy Leaderboards are updated. I have no specific facts, but from what I've heard, I believe that they get updated every few months, perhaps once per quarter. Did you know that you can run your own instance of speedlify to run these tests on your own set of websites?

Start an Eleventy site with just index.md As Juha-Matti Santala so eloquently put it "index.md is a valid Eleventy project." In this brief post, he highlights how, with Eleventy, "You can start so simple and keep enhancing it. You can pick the parts you want to bring in and skip the ones you don’t like or need." This tracks with the Quick Start in 2 Steps that Zach shows on the Eleventy home page. index.md for the win!

Register for 11ty conference Once again, there's still time to register for the 11ty conference, a free, single-day, single-track, and completely virtual conference scheduled for May 9th.

Until next time...

Recent releases

While I know that v3.0.0-alpha.6 was released, it does not appear to have been tagged on GitHub as of this writing. That said, I know that Zach and the team have been cranking through issues over the past week as evidenced by the quantity of email landing in my GitHub Gmail folder.

Posts from around the web since the last Bundle issue

index.md is a valid Eleventy project

Building website projects from the scratch with Eleventy is a delightful process in my experience because in the beginning, all you need is index.md and you can then customise and add on top of it as much as you like.

Juha-Matti Santala · Apr 13, 2024

Categories: Getting Started Why Eleventy?