Welcome to Eleventy-Zones!

Eleventy-Zones is a starter project for making Zonelets-style blogs with the static site generator (SSG) Eleventy.

Why use it?

Why is it even a thing?

I have a site that started off using Zoner, an SSG specifically for making Zonelets-style blogs.

Zoner is great at what it does! It's simple to use, you can write in Markdown, there's no client-side JS, and it even throws in an RSS feed. It's open-source, too, which sounded great when my site started to outgrow it...

...except that it's written in C#, which I had zero experience with. (Skill issue, I know.) I was able to tweak a few little things, but it made a lot more sense to just look into the world of general-purpose SSGs instead.

I settled on Eleventy. I liked that it encouraged starting with a blank canvas and only adding complexity as needed, which felt like a good balance of approachable now and powerful later. (Plus, for the "powerful later" part: Unlike C#, I'm already comfortable with JS!) And who can resist the cute possum mascots?

A friend had ported Zonelets as a Hugo theme (Hugo-Zones), and doing the same for Eleventy sounded like a good way for me to learn the ropes - I think it turned out pretty okay.

Where do I start?

In the tradition (and wording) of the original Zonelets: Click the links in "Recent Posts" to learn more. This site is formatted like a blog, which is kind of weird because it's not exactly a blog. That's because it's an example of an Eleventy-Zone and an explanation of Eleventy-Zones at the same time ;)

Updates?

Probably not much in terms of new features - I'd like to keep this project fairly bare-bones. I figure the less complex it is, the less daunting it is if you're just getting started with Eleventy (or with crafting web sites in general), and the less there is in the way of adding the extras you want.

I did give in and add RSS generation because that felt less like a nice-to-have and more like an essential blog component that Zonelets was missing. (Zoner and Hugo-Zones both included it from the start.)

The changelog is here, but if you make something with Eleventy-Zones, don't worry too much about checking back here for updates! This is, after all, a starter project - a template to build from, not a dependency to maintain.

I'd rather have the bells and whistles included.

There are many other starter projects to choose from! Like, kind of an overwhelming amount, actually, but the 11ty Bundle's curated list cherry-picks a few dozen excellent ones.

In fact, that list includes a newer Zonelets-inspired starter: Strawberry Starter! While a bit more complex than Eleventy-Zones, it's still pretty newcomer-friendly, and it comes with some cool extras right out of the box.