@JackieGable Iām back to follow up. Since writing back in September, Iāve started a new Eleventy project, converting (donāt laugh) an iWeb site that my wife had built back in the early 2000s when iWeb was an app from Apple for building websites. The code it generated was pretty nasty with tons of embedded styles. Itās still live at faustotasca.com. The Eleventy-based version is set to launch within the next couple of weeks.
But first a note: I am not a professional web dev. Since 2003, Iāve dabbled in web dev as a side-fascination, building sites with everything from MovableType, WordPress, SquareSpace, hand-coding, Meteor, Google Sites, Jekyll, and now Eleventy. Most of these were labors of love for friends and non-profits.
The docs are decent, not great, but quite usable. One of the things I donāt like about the docs is that theyāre peppered with notes about which version each feature was introduced in. The 1.0 release is currently in beta.
Google search has become my very good friend and Iāve found numerous examples, tutorials, and starters for Eleventy. Here are just a few.
Eleventy supports a wide variety of template languages, including Liquid. Iāve decided to use Nunjucks (which is very similar to Liquid) as it seems to be what most Eleventy devs who write about it are using, and thus, there are more examples of it out there. Unlike Liquid, you cannot pass parameters using {% include %}. That said, Nunjucks has macros that provide similar functionality.
Now that Iām headlong into Eleventy, Iāve taken that Jekyll site that I built (which was a conversion from WordPress) and converted it to Eleventy (also soon to relaunch). This has been a bit of a slog as I had bought a premade Jekyll template. So there was a lot of code that I hadnāt written and was a challenge to understand and convert.
I ran into one other thing with the Jekyll project that Iām moving to Eleventy. Since I hadnāt worked on it in a couple of months, and I was deep into Eleventy learning, when I went back to work on it, āJekyll crashedā and would not run it. It ultimately had to do with my Ruby setup. I donāt know what changed, but I was able to get it working again.
My gut sense from all of this is that I think thereās likely to be more future support for things based around node/npm, i.e., Eleventy, than around Ruby.