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About

Skeleventy is more opinionated than your typical 'barebones' starter kit. It's minimal design is a good basis to build upon for your blog or portfolio.

It's simple and flexible enough to change if you want to, but takes away the design headache for those who just want to get something up and running.

Folder structure

Eleventy

  • site/ contains all the global data, templates and content
  • utilities/ contains Eleventy helper filters and transforms
  • Each page should have it's own respective folder containing an index.md file
  • You can then choose the most appropriate layout for each page (or create more if you need to)
  • The navigation is powered by the official Eleventy navigation plugin

Assets

  • css/ for compiled CSS
  • js/ for compiled JavaScript
  • images/ contains our site's images, an SVG icon sprite and a folder for meta images (OG, Twitter etc)

The build pipeline

Laravel Mix gives us a nice API layer on top of Webpack. Skeleventy uses a simplistic set up, but you can take advantage of extending Mix with custom Webpack configurations, code splitting and plugins such as PostCSS, if you so wish.

You'll find the site's uncompiled SCSS and JS within resources/ where Mix will be watching these directories for any changes. Tip: it's best to always restart the server when creating any new partials or folders

SCSS

  • scss/ is structured into opinionated sub folders
  • The _config.scss file is where you can change the site's colours and the utility classes generated by Gorko
  • A typographic scale has already been set up using my personal favourite Major Third scale.
  • Tip: for more scales, check out Type Scale

Gorko

I decided to remove Tailwind in favour of Gorko, purely for its simplicity and maintainability (especially for newer developers). Not having too much to begin with and adding in what you need, will lead to a simpler, more maintainable codebase. Gorko lets you add a sprinkle of reusable utility classes to help keep your code DRY. Credit to Andy Bell for making this handy little tool

JavaScript

  • utilities/ contains any global utility/helper functions
  • modules/ contains your site's actual JavaScript, all kept neat and tidy within their respective modular subfolders
  • You can import these subfolders into main.js using import '@modules/example-module'
  • Tip: you can set up optional import aliases via the webpack.mix.js file

A note on responsive images

Skeleventy doesn't have responsive images baked in, the main reason being: it's best using CDN. Check out this tutorial on setting up Eleventy with Cloudinary.