To 11ty or not?

To 11ty or not?

11ty html templates html preprocessors static site generators

So, I had noticed that Stephanie Eckles, respected CSS figure had mentioned 11ty (or Eleventy) as one of the things she does. And once I started looking around, chatter about 11ty was everywhere.

Now, I was/(am?) deeply into Jekyll, industriously building it out with plugins, generators, and such to create the perfect standards based, sematic webified, site engine. Why would I want to restart that sort of thing from scratch with 11ty??? Other than the apparent momentum of people jumping ship from Jekyll to 11ty, many of whom I was using as guidance in my CSS adventures. Why would I want to learn this new thing, now?

Two things caught my eye:

  • 11ty is much faster
  • better templating options
So, my bigger sites, which I don't consider to be that big because I've never been that faithful of a blogger, are taking an awful long time to process. Creeping from seconds into minutes and that's both annoying and only going to get worse. As for the templating thing, that's a big can of worms because I had already invested a bunch of time and energy into writing plugins and generators for Jekyll. Would it be easier or more painful to redo and add to those functions with 11ty?

11ty is Javascript based and that's an enormous red flag for me as I've spent most of my 'net life avoiding Javascript. As a result, everyone's "11ty is based on Javascript, which you already know!" is just not true for me (or Node or Grunt or Gulp or ...). Of course, I didn't know Ruby when I started with Jekyll either, so it's not like I can't learn... it's just that I don't want to. ( >ะด<)

Then there's the template thing. 11ty is very proud of all the templating languages it supports. Liquid is interesting if flawed and I've never used another templating language, so it is tempting to see what else is out there. For a long time, I could not find any useful comparison reviews to help me decide on a templating language to try. I didn't want to jump from Liquid to Nunjucks just because all those JS-lovers think it's great. Finally I found a useful comparison chart.

I read through the whole post and based on that plus the handy chart, the list cuts down to ERB, Liquid, Twig, or Nunjucks. Twig is PHP based and I'm already uninterested in PHP, so: No to Twig. ERB is actually a generic templating system written in Ruby that happens to do HTML. I don't hate Ruby, but signing up for ERB would be signing up for even more Ruby and even more Javascript ... is there a point to that?

Liquid, of course, I already know, except that Jekyll's Liquid is not quite the same as 11ty's Liquid. So, is it better to make a clean break? On the one hand, one of the strengths (?) of 11ty is that you can mix and match templating languages. On the other hand, once I start converting tags, filters, plugins, and whatnot to filters, shortcodes and plugins would I be just doubling the work for myself?

If there were a "native" template language for 11ty it'd be Nunjucks... but then there's the whole web component "issue". It's a standard, and so merits attention. It also does what we would be using filters/plug-ins/shortcodes for, to a certain extent. What would be best to use? For my simple needs, is WebC a bonfire where a match would do?

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