11tyCMS

I started building websites with the Eleventy static site generator in April. It's SO much fun to build with! You code your website's templates, configure 11ty to use them, and it will generate a completely static website from the markdown files you give it. This very site you're on now is powered by 11ty!

When I started using 11ty, I began to notice something: writing markdown in VSCode sucks. The user experience is horrible and I'm a huge stickler for a nice UI and UX. But I didn't want to give up the light weight nature of 11ty for something more heavy like Wordpress... So I started Googling. But what I found was frustrating but also expected. All the CMS's out there for 11ty were based on Strapi, or required some server infrastructure. In my mind, this negates the point of 11ty: its supposed to be as simple as uploading the HTML files it outputs!

That's when I started thinking: I wonder if I can make my own local first, completely offline CMS for 11ty? At the end of the day, it's all a bunch of markdown files... How hard could it be? All I wanted was a local app that can open an 11ty site's folder, manage its posts and publish the site to your server from within the app... And so, 11tyCMS was born. I wrote a post detailing the problem, what 11tyCMS is, and how it would solve that problem. I wrote about the tech stack I planned on using and got to work.

This project is more complex than it sounds. I love 11ty, it gives you so much freedom in how you structure and design your websites. Its very unopinionated. But that's just the problem: it's unopinionated. There's no strict guardrails on file and folder structure. Any given site can vary wildly, and 11tyCMS would have to stand up to that challenge.

And after months of development, and a talk at "THE Eleventy Meetup", I'm proud to say: I'm very close to releasing my first public beta build. It's come a long way since April. I'm writing this very post to you from within 11tyCMS! It's a tool I use on a regular basis, and I'm so excited by its potential and to see what other people can do with it.

I would have released it sooner, but I want to ensure that my first users' exposure to 11tyCMS is a good one. All of my projects start off in "MVP mode", which is where I focus mainly on core functionality and getting things working. This comes at the expense of quality and design, but in my mind? You won't get anywhere if you start off trying to build perfect from the start. You don't even know what the parameters of the problems are yet! But once you've got things functional? Then you refactor, now that you know what your problems are, and how you can better write things.

After refactoring, the code base is SO much better! I've revolutionised how I use IPC in Electron, which makes development between the node side of Electron and the React side of it super easy. Not only that, but I've also implemented Zustand into the React side of things, and my god, it makes troubleshooting SO much better. It also makes tracking the data a boon.

Expect more posts on 11tyCMS both on the blog (at https://11tycms.com) and here very very soon!