Blog

Issue
82

Issue 82 - Eleventy: 2025 in Review, Got simple docs? Alex Zappa brings the juice! Vanessa Sickles' portfolio site, An update to Learn Eleventy, Bash your way to a blog, Sveltia CMS, Start with beer, Exploring a baseline, v2 of Podcaster, Eleventy Live!

· 2 releases · 19 posts · 12 sites

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A note from Bob:

First off, Happy New Year to all of you! I hope 2026 is off to a great start for you.

Next, if you're reading this on the website, welcome to the new design of the 11ty Bundle site! Damian Walsh and I have been hard at work redesigning the site, and we're excited to finally launch it. We hope you like the fresh look and improved usability. At some point, I'll write up more details about some new underpinnings of the site, but here are the highlights of what's new.

  • A cleaner, more modern design that should be easier to read and navigate.
  • A showcase of over 1,400 screenshots of sites built with Eleventy, complete with links to their live sites, and if they're on the 11ty Leaderboard, there's link to that too.
  • More detailed author profiles include descriptions, favicons, and social links (not X).
  • Recently updated starters featured on the home page.
  • A spotlight on authors of recent posts featured on the home page.
  • Improved search functionality, still powered by Pagefind.

Many thanks to those of you who provided feedback during the design process. Your input was invaluable in shaping the final product.

If you're an email subscriber, while you'll still get the newsletter, you'll be getting the "note from Bob" and the "Highlights" with deep links to the blog post's releases, posts, and sites built with Eleventy.

Finally, if you see anything wrong or broken, please let me know by email.

Enjoy!

P.S. The site is running flawlessly on Pre-release: Eleventy v4.0.0-alpha.6!

Highlights

Eleventy: 2025 in Review. Zach takes a look back at the past year with Eleventy, 2025 in Review. Amazing as it sounds, "...year-over-year npm downloads are up by 51%!" But my favorite line of the post is this one: "Eight years into this roller coaster of an open source project and it still feels like weโ€™re just getting started!" Yeeeeee-haaaaawwwww!

Got simple docs? ReallySimpleDocs is here, offering "A really simple documentation template built with 11ty and Tailwind."

Alex Zappa brings the juice. Alex Zappa designed a new starter he calls Electric Lime Starter. There's a GitHub repo as well as a live demo site. He describes it as "A vibrant, fast, and accessible starter theme for building static websites with Eleventy, TailwindCSS v4, and Alpine.js."

Vanessa Sickles' portfolio site. Vanessa Sickles describes how she built her cool new portfolio site using Eleventy.

An update to Learn Eleventy. uncenter, a valued presence on the 11ty Discord has released an updated version of Learn Eleventy. Originally created by Andy Bell, the update includes "Eleventy v3 and the modern Eleventy ecosystem; ESM syntax, the Eleventy Image plugin, Sass via Custom Template Languages (no more Gulp!), Luxon instead of moment.js, and many more smaller fixes."

Bash your way to a blog. Newman S Lanier shows how to use bash scripts to create and maintain a blog. Check out his in-depth starter repo for details.

Sveltia CMS. Sveltia CMS has a showcase of Eleventy sites that use it. You'll need to click on the Framework link to select Eleventy to see them. Update: They've added a search parameter to the URL to show only Eleventy sites.

Start with beer. While not brand new, the 11ty Beer starter has been updated. It's billed as "An 11ty blog template with Material Design, PWA and minified files that simply works."

Exploring a baseline. Billed as "An experimental Swiss army knife for Eleventy.", Eleventy Plugin Baseline "is a lightweight toolkit that collects small but useful patterns for everyday Eleventy development."

v2 of Podcaster. Nathan Bottomley released v2.0.0 of his Podcaster Eleventy starter. With it, you can "Host a podcast and create its website with Eleventy."

Eleventy Live! For those wondering where the band named Eleventy played back in 2018, we have that info for you right here. Check out the playlist. I really like that first song, Un-Blue. And then there's the band intros. Must've been before Zach joined ;-).

Until next time...