11ty is mostly written and maintained by Zach Leatherman. It is implemented in JavaScript.
The rationale for the name “11ty” is in the 11ty docs under project naming. It is related to how Zach Leatherman learned to count as a child.
The 11ty mascot is a possum attached to a helium balloon. It was contributed by James Williamson in May 2018.
11ty is the most popular SSG that supports multiple template languages.
A lot of big names in the web community love 11ty, including Andy Bell, Mathias Bynens, Chris Coyier, Rob Dodson, Una Kravets, Brian Leroux, Addy Osmani, Dave Rupert, Alex Russel, and Sara Soueidan. See testimonials.
11ty supports many markup languages including:
- HTML in .html files
- Markdown in .md files
11ty supports many templating languages including:
- Embedded JavaScript (EJS)
in
.ejsfiles - Haml in
.hamlfiles - Handlebars
in
.hbsfiles - JavaScript in
.11ty.jsfiles - JavaScript Template Literals in
.jstlfiles - Liquid
from Shopify in
.liquidfiles - Mustache
in
.mustachefiles - Nunjucks
from Mozilla in
.njkfiles - Pug in
.pugfiles
11ty does not currently support AsciiDoc.
An 11ty site can be built from source files that use a combination of markup and templating languages.
An 11ty project can be configured to work with
existing content files and an existing directory structure.
It looks for template files in all project directories
and outputs .html files in the _site directory (by default)
with the same directory structure.
The convention to write files to the _site directory
was copied from Jekyll which inspired many parts of 11ty.
The build process requires Node, but sites generated by 11ty do not require downloading any JavaScript code. JavaScript code can optionally be included for dynamic functionality.