Build Awesome / 11ty blades

A curated collection of Eleventy (11ty) tricks, starters, command line tips, configuration snippets, and templating techniques.

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Best Minimal Starters for Build Awesome / 11ty as of Mar 2026

Awesome Eleventy ecosystem offers a wide variety of starters.

Not sure where to begin? Start with a minimal template:

Repo Stats
npm Dependencies Custom CSS
Custom JS
Custom Templates
What's Included?
/anydigital/build-awesome-starter

~10 ~30 lines ♻️ uses tailwind & blades[.css] 0 ♻️ uses eleventy-blades ~10 lines ♻️ uses blades[.njk] Sveltia CMS
/11ty/eleventy-base-blog

~10 ~300 lines ~200 lines ~200 lines uses .njk
/MWDelaney/zeropoint

~15 ~200 lines ~300 lines ~250 lines uses .njk
/anydigital/bladeswitch

3 ♻️ 0 ♻️ uses pico.css & blades[.css] 0 ♻️ uses eleventy-blades ~15 lines ♻️ uses blades[.liquid|.njk] Sveltia CMS
Not up-to-date:
/danurbanowicz/eleventy-sveltia-cms-starter

~10 ~150 lines ~130 lines ~250 lines uses .njk Sveltia CMS
Not so minimal:
/scottsweb/elva

~25 ⚠️ ~1000 lines ⚠️ ~30 files ⚠️ ~20 files Front Matter CMS local use only
/madrilene/eleventy-excellent

~40 ⚠️ ~40 files ⚠️ ~40 files ⚠️ ~40 files ⚠️
/adamstddrd/grease

~5 ♻️ ~25 files ⚠️ ~15 files ~15 files
/nhoizey/pack11ty

~15 ~30 files ⚠️ ~10 files ~10 files

Nunjucks Tricks

Syntax highlighting in VS Code~editors

This is a modern fork of the original extension. It is specifically designed to solve the "11ty problem" where you mix Nunjucks and HTML.

Why it's better: It injects Nunjucks grammar directly into the standard HTML grammar. This means you get full Nunjucks highlighting and the editor still knows it's an HTML file, giving you better Emmet and CSS autocompletion.

No Config: It works out of the box without needing to manually map file associations in your settings.

Auto-formatting in VS Code~editors

  1. 🧩 Install /prettier/prettier-vscode (if not yet)

  2. Install a compatible Prettier plugin for your project, for example:

npm i -D prettier-plugin-jinja-template
  1. It might be tricky to find a well-maintained Nunjucks plugin, but jinja-template works just fine with .njk via .html override:
{
  "plugins": ["prettier-plugin-jinja-template"],
  "overrides": [
    {
      "files": ["*.njk", "*.html"],
      "options": {
        "parser": "jinja-template"
      }
    }
  ]
}

PRO TIP: If you already use /anydigital/blades, it’s even easier. You can simply:

ln -s ./node_modules/@anydigital/blades/.prettierrc.json

Sort array by attribute

Per official .njk documentation:

sort(arr, reverse, caseSens, attr)
Sort arr with JavaScript's arr.sort function. If reverse is true, result will be reversed. Sort is case-insensitive by default, but setting caseSens to true makes it case-sensitive. If attr is passed, will compare attr from each item.

But you can actually do this trick:

{% for item in array | sort(attribute='weight') %}
  ...
{% endfor %}

Include and render .md file w/o its Front Matter in 11ty 

{# first, get the raw content using `html` as plain-text engine #}
{% set _eval = "{% renderFile './YOUR_FILE.md', {}, 'html' %}" %}
{% set _raw_md = _eval | renderContent('njk') %}

{# then, remove the front matter using regex, and render using `md` #}
{{ _raw_md | replace(r/^---[\s\S]*?---/, '') | renderContent('md') | safe }}

  11ty / Build Awesome ↗

Eleventy is [slowly] becoming Build Awesome

More on topic:

Starter projects

Projects that provide a quick starting point for Eleventy sites:

Modern v4 starters:

Minimally maintained:

Archived
  • 📦 Eleventy One - A scaffold for a quick start building with the Eleventy SSG.
  • 📦 Hylia - Hylia is a lightweight Eleventy starter kit with Netlify CMS pre-configured, so that you can one-click install a progressive, accessible blog in minutes.
  • 📦 Deventy - A minimal 11ty starting point for building static websites with modern tools.
  • 📦 Eleventy Starter Ghost - A starter template to build websites with Ghost & Eleventy.
  • 📦 Eleventy Web Starter - A modern static website workflow using Eleventy, Tailwind CSS, Webpack and PostCSS.
  • 📦 Eleventy Starter Boilerplate - 🚀 Eleventy Starter Boilerplate is production-ready with SEO-friendly for quickly starting a blog. ⚡️ Built with Eleventy, ESLint, Prettier, Webpack, PostCSS, Tailwind CSS.
  • 📦 Eleventy Garden - A starter site for building a mind garden in Eleventy.

Plugins

Tutorials and guides

Templating:

Migration:

Webmentions:

GraphQL:

Archived

Sites using Eleventy (Build Awesome)

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