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. (Personal problem, 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.

Updates?

Probably not much. I'd like to keep this project fairly bare-bones so you can add your own extras. (There are plenty of other starters to choose from that already have all the bells and whistles.)

That said, I might give in and add RSS support. There are lots of other nice-to-haves that Zonelets doesn't do either (post tags/categories, image optimization...), but RSS really feels like an essential that's missing. (Zoner and Hugo-Zones both add it.)