griimick / eleventy-base-blog-gsheets

Just edit Google Sheets to update a static site generated by 11ty. Hosted on Netlify and uses Zapier to trigger rebuilds on updates.

eleventy-base-blog-gsheets

A starter repository showing how to build a blog with the Eleventy static site generator and get its data from Google Sheets. The workflow becomes as simple as updating the Google Sheet to update the blog.

Use Case

I have been using this template to generate personal investment summary in a private side project. I will add a link to the project here once it is done.

Demos

• Netlify
• GitHub Pages
• Remix on Glitch

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Getting Started

1. Clone this Repository

git clone https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog.git my-blog-name

2. Navigate to the directory

cd my-blog-name

Specifically have a look at .eleventy.js to see if you want to configure any Eleventy options differently.

3. Install dependencies

npm install

4. Edit _data/metadata.json

5. Run Eleventy

npx eleventy

Or build and host locally for local development

npx eleventy --serve

Or build automatically when a template changes:

npx eleventy --watch

Or in debug mode:

DEBUG=* npx eleventy

Implementation Notes

• about/index.md shows how to add a content page.
• posts/ has the blog posts but really they can live in any directory. They need only the post tag to be added to this collection.
• Add the nav tag to add a template to the top level site navigation. For example, this is in use on index.njk and about/index.md.
• Content can be any template format (blog posts needn’t be markdown, for example). Configure your supported templates in .eleventy.js -> templateFormats.
  • Because css and png are listed in templateFormats but are not supported template types, any files with these extensions will be copied without modification to the output (while keeping the same directory structure).
• The blog post feed template is in feed/feed.njk. This is also a good example of using a global data files in that it uses _data/metadata.json.
• This example uses three layouts:
  • _includes/layouts/base.njk: the top level HTML structure
  • _includes/layouts/home.njk: the home page template (wrapped into base.njk)
  • _includes/layouts/post.njk: the blog post template (wrapped into base.njk)
• _includes/postlist.njk is a Nunjucks include and is a reusable component used to display a list of all the posts. index.njk has an example of how to use it.