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The End of Eleventy

brennan.day

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Re: The End of Eleventy

#91

Post by 9dev »

kingo55 wrote: post #66

It's sad to see 11ty co-opted like this especially after building a complex project on it with several thousand pages ( https://www.extravirginvault.com/ ). Despite the complexity, I feel like it's only a couple of days work to replatform my site to a more modern SSG like Astro. Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.

Friendly heads-up, because that site looks like you've put in a tremendous amount of time to style it right: The carousels clip the shadows of their children. You could avert that by giving it more inner padding and using negative horizontal margins to counter that :)

Re: The End of Eleventy

#92

Post by pjmlp »

trinix912 wrote: post #83
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well. I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis. Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, lo…

That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of…

How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial?

On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.

Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#93

Post by ymolodtsov »

TLDR: Lookup Sveltia CMS

> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.

I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.

There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.

Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).

I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.

I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#94

Post by ymolodtsov »

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 fantastic. And with AI you don't have to deal with the piping much, just force it to have a reasonable opinionated framework at the base.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#95

Post by ymolodtsov »

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).

There's a number of headless CMS solutions for commercial websites. Hosted, multi-user, paid. It's just a different category.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#96

Post by ymolodtsov »

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.

This is generally solvable unless they wanted radical layout changes. There are headless CMS solutions, just ensure that no texts are hardcoded and instead put in a config. Such configs can be made editable in the CMS.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#97

Post by unsungNovelty »

I've been using Hugo for some of these reasons for the last 6+ years. The project seems to chug along. They've updated the documentation now and everything is super good there.

And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.

But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.

I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#98

Post by cachius »

kingo55 wrote: post #66

It's sad to see 11ty co-opted like this especially after building a complex project on it with several thousand pages ( https://www.extravirginvault.com/ ). Despite the complexity, I feel like it's only a couple of days work to replatform my site to a more modern SSG like Astro. Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.

How comes there are only three oils from Greece listed? They are like the OGs in this game!

Re: The End of Eleventy

#99

Post by jaza »

notpushkin wrote: post #65
PaulHoule wrote: post #8

The thing about SSGs is that you only need a small percentage of the functionality they offer and for what: so instead of some simple syntax for links you can remember in HTML description there is something weird and irregular I always have to look up in the manual in Markdown and all sorts of other Markdown WTFs. Every time I tried to get started on a personal site with an SSG I would get depressed looking at hundre…

You can use 11ty with plain HTML pages/posts, I believe. [1] And it doesn’t handle deployment at all. What you get is the same dist/ directory that your Python script would happily upload to S3. This was the beauty of 11ty. It just puts together HTML files from templates, and maybe handles sitemap and RSS if you need. That will probably change now. [1]: Just be sure to set `htmlTemplateEngine` to false in the config,…

This. The 11ty sites that I've built (all personal sites that will only ever be edited by me) are all plain HTML, no markdown. 11ty is lovely and bare-bones and un-opinionated.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#100

Post by cachius »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #19

My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.

Local LLM feels like the wrong tool for a file converter? LLMs shine in natural language processing, but their statistical nature doesn't fit consistent file conversions as more Turing-like programs.
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