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The End of Eleventy

brennan.day

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Re: The End of Eleventy

#181

Post by krisgenre »

teekert wrote: post #43
xp84 wrote: post #5

SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay. For those who…

I started my client's site on Hugo, withing 2 days I was editing something for them every 30 mins (slight exaggeration). They wanted something they could edit, they don't do Markdown, they don't manually write URLs they want to drag images into their posts and pages. So bye bye Hugo.

Eleventy + Decap CMS + gitlab has been working well for our marketing team for the past 3+ years. Also, with Claude/Gemini/Copilot it is a lot easier to edit templates and add new pages when all of the files are right there on your filesystem.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#182

Post by ai-tamer »

It's annoying when a project you depend on gets taken in a direction you didn't sign up for. But the silver lining here is that the cost of maintaining a fork has dropped dramatically. A few years ago, forking something like 11ty and keeping it alive long-term was a real commitment — bug triage, dependency updates, staying compatible with the ecosystem. Now, that kind of maintenance work is exactly what LLMs are good at. You can realistically fork it, keep it on the version you liked, and have an AI handle the boring upkeep.

The perpetual "this project is now dead" anxiety around OSS is becoming less warranted. Which might upset people who'd rather debate sustainability models than just fix the dep.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#183

Post by leventhan »

charles_f wrote: post #18

I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y. I refuse to learn anything about ruby, or spend any time upgrading Jekyll or any of the 2 plug-ins I use, and I take a weird pride in that. It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else. I have no idea how it works anymore. For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned. That version o…

I'm in the same Jekyll boat! If it works, it works.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#184

Post by mb2100 »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #129
preommr wrote: post #13

Much prefer astro. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me. Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is mu…

Astro is very nice, but I kinda feel like they are adding a lot of features I don't want and will never need. It's starting to feel too fancy for SSG. My first time using it I encountered 3 separate bugs with their compiler. The fanciness has a price.

That was exactly my experience as well, hence I created a "Minimal Astro": https://mastrojs.github.io

Re: The End of Eleventy

#185

Post by adzm »

deaux wrote: post #165
adzm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astro is great, and easily extensible just by looking at the code and existing extensions too. Highly recommend it. Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.

> Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well. I've tried multiple times to come up with usecases where they are worth it, but still haven't found any. The only theoretical examples are things where you wouldn't be using Astro in thr first place, like real-time document collaboration or something. Curious what you've found them so useful for. Besides just preferring React syntax to HTML+TS I…

Well I have a static site generated with Astro that includes parts that still use dynamic react stuff, for example an interactive dashboard / slideshow kind of thing and interactive widgets. The data is baked into the static site but I still wanted the rich interactivity from react in certain places. It naturally grew from an Astro project that didn't need any react stuff, so it was a logical and simple step to add it in the few places it was needed.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#186

Post by peteforde »

sublinear wrote: post #179
peteforde wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying that you fundamentally object to people figuring out how to make something that they created sustainable? I clearly don't feel this way, but I'm earnestly curious to hear why you do!

Making something sustainable is a different problem and a different set of skills. I have nothing against anyone who wants to do both. I'm just saying some variant of what I'm thinking has to be why it's not as popular as you want or expect. Something else worth considering is that people can actually be much better at (and better off) doing things they're not so passionate about. This isn't just about devs being pre…

That's really fascinating, thanks. You've given me lots to think about.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the different structures associated with patronage. I remember that at one point David Bowie released a public offering of shares in his future value. If memory serves, the outcomes were mediocre but not a loss.

I actually think that this is kind of awesome. To me, the key detail is modest returns. Every asset class is volatile but our society has taken a really hard turn towards celebrating rent seeking. If someone has capital and can be convinced to give someone the financial leverage that they need to, for example, buy a truck instead of becoming the employee of a guy who bought a fleet of trucks with someone else's money, that's a formula for raising a lot of people up through middle class ranks.

Now, some people would take that advance and go to Vegas and do the least responsible thing, for sure. But I'm into giving people the benefit of doubt when possible.

I don't think we really disagree so much as I'm holding optimism that there are still big ideas and techniques that we haven't thought of, yet. I am guided by a confidence that we are more likely to succeed when we don't assume that things need to work in a certain way.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#187

Post by pjmlp »

hobofan wrote: post #74
yallpendantools wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a tenable workflow for the marketing department to use a SSG over Wordpress? - WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook. - They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS". - It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least…

I think that's exactly the point where the article falls flat. There is potentially a big oppurtunity in building a SSG + CMS solution despite the past failed attempts. Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).

That is where headless CMS with Vercel and Netlify partnerships, using Next.js SSG capabilities come into play, regardless how much folks hate them.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#188

Post by wltr »

9dev wrote: post #90
wltr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can live preview my website from my local server / computer / laptop, while writing content from basically anything. Even a cheap and underpowered writing deck with 400 MHz CPU. The options are limitless.

You're absolutely underestimating the complexity of proper live preview of changes. This is essentially "hot reload" mode, but on the public internet, because it has to run on a public domain. Getting that right is a challenge, and if you don't know why, you haven't attempted to solve it yet.

I would appreciate getting into more details. As it sounds like a made-up problem to me. Perhaps you don’t understand how simple it is to have a static website as compared to a dynamic one. Especially to some simple project.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#189

Post by xp84 »

busterarm wrote: post #31
xp84 wrote: post #5

SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay. For those who…

The WordPress hacking/plugin security issue has been a solved problem for well over 10 years now if you're even basically competent. Especially if you're using something like WP Engine or Pantheon for hosting.

WP Engine etc. cost a fortune - tens of thousands per year when you get a lot of traffic - for something that could be served statically for pennies.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#190

Post by deaux »

adzm wrote: post #185
deaux wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well. I've tried multiple times to come up with usecases where they are worth it, but still haven't found any. The only theoretical examples are things where you wouldn't be using Astro in thr first place, like real-time document collaboration or something. Curious what you've found them so useful for. Besides just preferring React syntax to HTML+TS I…

Well I have a static site generated with Astro that includes parts that still use dynamic react stuff, for example an interactive dashboard / slideshow kind of thing and interactive widgets. The data is baked into the static site but I still wanted the rich interactivity from react in certain places. It naturally grew from an Astro project that didn't need any react stuff, so it was a logical and simple step to add i…

I've got slideshows and interactive calculators and things and it all works fine without the islands, that's the thing. LLMs will just incorrectly pattern match "interactivity = React".
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