Investigate 11ty

[DEGoodmanWilson]

Hugo is a little bit of a pain for me and the other board members; it's hard for us to find templates we need to modify sometimes (and template organization has gone to shit as a result), and cumbersome to add new content (you have to remember not only the magic Hugo command, but run it from the right path). Maybe we're asking too much from a static site generator, I don't know.

Anyway, I've heard interesting things about 11ty, and I am curious to understand if it is going to help make site maintenance easier. The scope of this issue is to understand whether 11ty can help us with these problems:

• 1. Creating and modifying templates should happen in exactly one place (Hugo can do this, but since we're basing the theme on an existing template that we can't modify in place, we have two places for the templating as we're using it)
• 2. Building should be pretty straightforward
• 3. Testing too! Right now, I have three separate config files for Hugo, a common one, a production one, and a development one.
• 4. Creating new content should be really straightforward (secondary because we aren't making that much content yet!)
• 5. It should be pleasant for our front-end devs to use.

[simskij]

Numbered the list, to make it easier to branch out into multiple discussion.

1. First off, I vote to roll our own theme. It will likely take less time then understanding someone elses css. 😅

2 & 3. This is likely pretty much the same for all static site generators.

4. Agreed. We must make sure that the hassle of publishing isn't the reason why content isn't created.

[simskij]

https://stackshare.io/stackups/11ty-vs-gatsbyjs
https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1107377359546736641?lang=en
11ty/eleventy#745
https://brycewray.com/posts/2019/09/why-left-hugo-eleventy/

[brycewray]

https://stackshare.io/stackups/11ty-vs-gatsbyjs
https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1107377359546736641?lang=en
11ty/eleventy#745
https://brycewray.com/posts/2019/09/why-left-hugo-eleventy/

For what it's worth re the last one, I actually returned to Hugo (not just the brief time in 2019) — not because there was anything wrong with Eleventy, for which I remain a huge fanboy, but because I wanted a simpler dev experience not tied to npm dependencies and all that. I explain that a little bit in the “epilogue” part of https://brycewray.com/posts/2020/09/ignition-sequence-start.

[simskij]

It turns out I unfortunately lack time to contribute. Sorry for being a blocker.