Eleventy Blog

New Sponsorship Tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter

2026-05-13T05:00:00Z

We’ve added a bit more information about the new sponsorship tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter.

Your company uses Eleventy currently or wants to support the Build Awesome platform moving forward.
You’re interested in getting your brand icon in the Font Awesome Icon library (for everyone to use!).
You want to plaster your sponsor logo across the Awesomeverse (Build Awesome, Font Awesome, and Web Awesome web sites).

If any of the above things apply to you, have a look!

Don’t see something that fits? Contact me directly!

Full Coverage

2026 April Build Awesome Pro Kickstarter
2026 May Blog Awesome: Introducing: Build Awesome
2026 May Blog Awesome: New Sponsorship Tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter
2026 April Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement
2026 March Eleventy is now Build Awesome
2026 March Podcast Awesome: Eleventy Is Rebranding to Build Awesome: What Changes (and What Doesn’t) 24m
2026 March Eleventy Meetup (on YouTube): AMA about Build Awesome, an Open Town Hall 44m

Back Build Awesome Pro and make it easier to build for the web!

2026-04-28T05:00:00Z

We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites and today we’ve launched a Kickstarter with that goal in mind!

Where should you start?

Personally, I think the poster video on the Build Awesome Pro Kickstarter pairs nicely with any kind of cheese (but I just like cheese).
Prefer a lower-level developer-focused introduction? Read the blog post: Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement.
Want to watch some more demos and videos? Head over to the Kickstarter! We have a few demo videos there!

We are so lucky to have the opportunity to build this project and as always we are so grateful for your support!

If you’re an 11ty Open Collective backer (active or otherwise), check your email for some secret tier rewards!

Join the 621 backers of Build Awesome!

Until May 28

Next Stretch Goal

You can also watch the video here:

It’s the same video on the Build Awesome Pro Kickstarter.
Or even on YouTube: Now on Kickstarter: Build Awesome — Collaborate on Web Sites That Last

Full Coverage

2026 April Build Awesome Pro Kickstarter
2026 May Blog Awesome: Introducing: Build Awesome
2026 May Blog Awesome: New Sponsorship Tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter
2026 April Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement
2026 March Eleventy is now Build Awesome
2026 March Podcast Awesome: Eleventy Is Rebranding to Build Awesome: What Changes (and What Doesn’t) 24m
2026 March Eleventy Meetup (on YouTube): AMA about Build Awesome, an Open Town Hall 44m

Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement

2026-04-21T05:00:00Z

TL;DR After a whoopsie-daisy false-start on our initial Kickstarter campaign, we’re ramping up again to launch Kickstarter Final_FINAL_v2 on April 28, 2026.

We’re improving how developers collaborate on the Open Web. Get notified on April 28th!

We’ve noticed a few things:

Static sites are still the most resilient, robust, long-lasting, and secure architecture when building for the web. Using a static architecture to reduce your attack surface is an investment in your peace of mind. You shouldn’t have to maintain security hypervigilance to run a web site.
Developers face too much infrastructure lock-in when shipping dynamic features (especially in the JavaScript tooling ecosystem). Perhaps you’ve been eyeing the per-compute pricing on your serverless bill as bot traffic increases over time.
Adding collaborative editing and content management features to your static web site requires more configuration work than it should to get up and running.

Build Awesome Pro is a new web site builder that attempts to solve each of these problems. Fast by default, durable over time, with way less dependency drama. Build Awesome Pro will feature:

Static output. Versioned in git. Build and deploy wherever you’d like.
Bring your own project or choose from our curated list of starter templates. Have an Eleventy project? We’ll maintain full compatibility with existing Eleventy projects and the Eleventy ecosystem.
No lock-in. Edit and collaborate on our infrastructure. Host anywhere (optionally with us). Eject at any time with your site as-is.

Build Awesome Pro offers the option to add collaborative editing to your project as an infrastructure-level Progressive Enhancement.

Get notified (April 28th) on Kickstarter!

One Possible Editable API

Consider the following hypothetical Hello World example that opts-in a specific data property for editing in a Markdown file:

---
title: World
---
# Hello, {{ title | editable }}

Expand to see what the API might look like in a JavaScript content file.

import { editable } from "@awesome.me/build-pro";

export function render({ title }) {
	return `<h1>Hello, ${editable(title)}</h1>`;
}

When using Build Awesome Pro (and with the proper permissions for editing), the title data property will render as an editable value on the page. Edits can be made directly in-browser and are applied in the data cascade to apply project-wide.

Hello, `World`

Build Awesome Pro will expose controls in your project to make your content editable inline (in this example, a String literal). And when folks edit the above template, their edits will persist directly via commits in version control in the original data cascade location:

---
-title: World
+title: Moon
---
# Hello, {{ title | editable }}

This will render the template’s new title property in the data cascade (wherever used throughout your project), in this case something like:

Hello, `Moon`

At some future time, if you decide that editing is no longer necessary for your project, your Build Awesome project will still build using the open source engine for hosting wherever you’d like, without any changes! No lock-in, no shenanigans.

Check out this lower-level (developer-specific) example of full template editing and build-in-a-browser on our home page.

Get notified — April 28!

Build Awesome Pro is a better way to build and collaborate on websites! Convenient for developers and easy-to-use for the whole team: fast, flexible, and built to last.

Join the 621 backers of Build Awesome!

Until May 28

Next Stretch Goal

Stay tuned: Build Awesome (11ty) v4 is coming with that same great 11ty flavor you’re used to: more features with fewer dependencies and an ever-improving focus on build performance!

Full Coverage

2026 April Build Awesome Pro Kickstarter
2026 May Blog Awesome: Introducing: Build Awesome
2026 May Blog Awesome: New Sponsorship Tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter
2026 April Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement
2026 March Eleventy is now Build Awesome
2026 March Podcast Awesome: Eleventy Is Rebranding to Build Awesome: What Changes (and What Doesn’t) 24m
2026 March Eleventy Meetup (on YouTube): AMA about Build Awesome, an Open Town Hall 44m

The Possum Mascot, now with additional Awesome

2026-03-23T05:00:00Z

As Eleventy enters the Awesomeverse as Build Awesome and joins the esteemed ranks of both Font Awesome and Web Awesome, the possum is taking on more responsibility as well.

That’s right, the new iteration of our beloved possum mascot will be representing the larger Awesomeverse of open source projects as well (complete with custom wardrobe)!

Puppeteer isn’t just for headless browsers any more.

You can read the history of our prior possum commissions:

Eleventy Mascot Series

(Unknown Name)

James Williamson. 22 May 2018. Before the possum, there was the cat

Edison

James Williamson. 22 May 2018. James pioneered the static-generating possum.

Grumpy

Phineas X. Jones. 18 December 2019. Our first commissioned iteration.

Masked Grumpy

Remixed by Ben Brignell. 7 July 2020

(Not yet named)

Geri Coady. July 2021. Our second commission! The community has grown.

A Single Div

Lynn Fisher. October 2022. From a.singlediv.com.

Elle

David Neal. November 2023. Our third commission! We’re getting smarter.

Awesome Possum

Font Awesome. March 2026. The possum has grown up! Now the mascot of the larger Awesomeverse.

Eleventy is now Build Awesome

2026-03-03T06:00:00Z

It’s one small step for 11ty, one giant leap for Build Awesome.

When 11ty joined Font Awesome in September 2024, it was hot on the heels of the successful Web Awesome Kickstarter, notably upgrading the Shoelace project from a bootstrapped side project to a sustainable and thriving full-time open source project with employees supporting its maintenance, new feature development, and future.

We are following the same playbook for Eleventy! To support us, subscribe to the upcoming Build_Awesome_Kickstarter final_Final_v2.psd and get notified when the campaign launches!

Folks following along closely may have noticed the oopsie-daisy false-start fundraising campaign earlier this week. Given a few email deliverability hiccups, folks not following along closely may not know about the campaign at all! We are taking a mulligan.

Subscribe to the Build Awesome Kickstarter

What does Build Awesome mean for Eleventy?

First and foremost, it’s very important to recognize how instrumental Font Awesome has been to the progress the Eleventy project has made in the last 18 months — and you can review a lot of those in the Eleventy, 2025 in Review highlights!

Secondly, the name change is not a clean break for Eleventy — this is a continuation of the open source project under the larger Awesome banner. Eleventy v4 will be Build Awesome v4. I, Zach, am still lovingly shepherding the open source project forward, the same as before.

If you have a project using Eleventy, I can promise the same obsessive attention to smooth major-version upgrades. Folks have come to expect this from Eleventy, and I’m proud of the reputation we’ve earned there. We’ll continue to guide folks using the Upgrade Helper plugin.

Notably, we are committed to keeping full compatibility with the existing Eleventy community and ecosystem: that means you will be able to continue to use Eleventy plugins with Build Awesome!

Further, we will even maintain compatibility with your existing Eleventy build commands. The proof will be in the pudding, and I look forward to delighting folks here.

What does Build Awesome Pro mean for Eleventy?

After the launch of Font Awesome Pro, the number of free icons in the Font Awesome library tripled, and the full set grew from 675 icons to just over 64,000 icons!

After the launch of Web Awesome Pro, the project has now shipped with over 50 components, 30 reusable patterns, and a whole slew of themes with light and dark modes!

Build Awesome Pro means that we can continue to grow and invest in the open source project, providing more features, more maintenance, and increased stability for everyone.

Font Awesome Pro is not required to use Font Awesome. Web Awesome Pro is not required to use Web Awesome. And Build Awesome Pro will not be required to use Build Awesome (Eleventy).

The Awesomeverse of projects have a straightforward business model and Font Awesome has the track record to prove it. You subscribe and you get more: more services, more support — all while helping to grow the free and open source version for everyone. No shenanigans.

What does this mean for the Open Collective account?

For a bit of history, you can read about our Open Collective fundraising push in early 2024 in the blog post: Open Source Needs to be Financially Symbiotic, which has some notes about our current Open Collective account. We also made a change last year to permanently feature individuals that have contributed to Eleventy over the years in our site’s (very large) backer facepile.

This account is still being used to pay for expenses related to the project: costs related to our web site, expenses for the Meetup (Zoom subscriptions), honorariums and other costs from the 11ty Conference (in 2024), as well as some recurring donations to some dependencies in our stack. If you have eligible expenses, please use the Submit Expense button on Open Collective to get reimbursed!

This also includes hosting and domain costs for community resources! Even if they’re old expenses, please get those receipts in so we can reimburse you.

But importantly, moving forward — the best way to support the project moving forward will be through the Kickstarter campaign.

Subscribe to the Build Awesome Kickstarter

If folks have questions about any of this, please send them my way! My DMs are open on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Related: Podcast Awesome: Eleventy is Rebranding to Build Awesome: What Changes (and What Doesn’t)

Eleventy, 2025 in Review

2026-01-05T06:00:00Z

It was another huge year for 11ty. We shipped 177 releases (73% more than 2024) across the full 11ty/* suite. We closed 804 issues (15% more than 2024). We reduced core’s dependency count by 28% and weight by 22%. More folks are building with Eleventy than ever: our year-over-year npm downloads (for only core) are up by 51%! Eight years into this roller coaster of an open source project and it still feels like we’re just getting started!

You can also read last year’s Eleventy, 2024 in Review.

Highlights

Here is a small, curated collection of 2025 highlights:

In April, we moved to our own Mastodon server. Also the amazing Eleventy LibDoc community starter project first shipped!
In May, we shipped a sizeable v3.1.0 release focused on reducing dependencies and improving build performance! We also shipped an interactive playground component to the docs (Eleventy in the browser!).
In June, we were featured in a video on the Veronica Explains YouTube channel!
In July, we started shipping 4.x alpha pre-releases!
In August, I found an old note from my late grandmother about the origins of the Eleventy name.
In September, we found our logo added to the Font Awesome v7 icon set!
In October, we changed the docs supporter facepile to include emeritus individual supporters and shamefully added long-awaited copy-paste buttons.
In November, we rehauled how we use GitHub Issues and made a bunch of long-overdue progress on our Issue tracker. Estela Franco also showed us their Eleventy source code backpack
In December, we improved our security footprint by eliminating Access Tokens from our npm package publishing process.
- We simplified our historical docs by centralizing to v0, v1, v2, and v3 subdomains.
- We improved the docs for different flavors of JavaScript (CommonJS, ESM, and TypeScript) to use in Eleventy (including guidance on Node’s new type stripping features).
With a special sustained community nod to the ×17 11ty Bundle Newsletters and ×8 11ty Meetups that happened in 2025!

Metrics

Core

Cumulative Metric	2023	2024	2025	2025 Change
Newest Version (Stable)	v2.0.1	v3.0.0	v3.1.2	0.1.2 😅
Dependency Count (Stable)	213	187	134	28.3%
Size (Stable)	35 MB	27 MB	21 MB	22.2%
npm Downloads	7,585,613	10,711,017	15,432,081	44.0%
GitHub dependents	69,632	79,563	86,953	9.2%
GitHub Stars	15,569	17,460	19,174	9.8%

Year over Year

Year over Year Metric	2023	2024	2025	2025 Change
npm Downloads (Core)	2,915,939	3,125,404	4,721,064	51.1%
GitHub Issues Closed	519	695	804	15.7%
GitHub Pull Requests Closed	197	326	337	3.4%

Cumulative Metric	2023	2024	2025	2025 Change
`11ty-community` Sites	1,018	1,175	1,283	9.2%
Mastodon Friends	3,565	4,217	4,212	-0.1%
Bluesky Friends	99	2,344	3,221	37.4%
YouTube Subscribers	1,880	2,498	3,210	28.5%
Discord Members	3,093	3,253	3,424	5.2%
LinkedIn Super Professional Network	265	737	988	34.1%

Unfortunately we lost 606 friends in an automated transition to a new Mastodon server.

Releases

Across all of 11ty/* we’ve shipped so many things!

	2024	2025
Major Releases	13	16
Minor/Patch Releases	-	89
Pre-releases	-	75
All Releases	102	177	73.5%

Major Releases

Eleventy Image v6.0 to optimize images in Eleventy projects.
Image Color v1.0 is a new utility to fetch colors from an image. README.
Long overdue v1.0 of Eleventy Navigation to create hierarchical navigation menus in Eleventy.
Both v6 and v7 of the Eleventy Vite Plugin continues use of Eleventy with Vite (thank you to our lovely maintainer Kilian Finger for these!)
Parse Date Strings v2.0 is used to add RFC-9557 (Temporal API) date parsing support to Eleventy’s date property.
<is-land> v5.0 is a lazy loader for component code in any web site.
Eleventy Font Awesome v1.0 allows use of hyper-optimized tree-shaken Font Awesome SVG icons in Eleventy projects.
Pulling some dependencies in-house for maintenance and cleanup:
- Recursive Copy v4.0 and v5.0 (facilitates our passthrough copy feature)
- Gray Matter v2.0 (and v1.0) (front matter parsing)
- With a future nod to pre-release work done to update Nunjucks

Most utilities and plugins listed above can be used independently of Eleventy and Eleventy projects (exceptions to the Vite and the Font Awesome plugins).

Thank You!

2025 would not have been possible without our community and supporters.

To everyone that has built something with Eleventy: thank you!
To everyone that has answered a question about Eleventy: on the Discord, on social media, in GitHub issues or discussion, at your local meetup or coffee shop: thank you!
To everyone that has written a blog post on their personal site or shared Eleventy on social media: thank you!
To everyone that dropped a few nice words of appreciation: thank you!
To everyone that has supported us: thank you!
Thank you to Font Awesome friends Dave Gandy and Travis Chase!
Thank you to Bob Monsour! (of 11tybundle.dev fame)
Thank you to Sia Karamalegos! (of 11tymeetup.dev fame)
Thank you to Kilian Finger for their contributions to the Eleventy Vite plugin!
Thank you to Peter deHaan, Raphael Höser, and uncenter for contributions on GitHub!
Thank you to Stephanie Eckles, Ben Myers, Sia Karamalegos, Shiv Jha-Mathur, Dan Leatherman, Evan Sheehan, Cassey Lottman, Thomas Michael Semmler for contributions our Discord server!

Eleventy Core Dependency Watch (2025 Edition)

2025-12-12T06:00:00Z

In our quest for smoother long term maintenance and hardened security footprint, we wanted to let folks know that we’ve made even more exciting dependency simplification improvements on the v4 canary prereleases!

Notably when comparing v4.0.0-alpha.6 to v3.1.2, we’ve:

Reduced our total dependency count from 134 to 105 (21.6%)
Dropped third-party dependency count from 123 to 89 (27.6%)
Decreased node_modules weight from 21 MiB to 14 MiB (33.3%)

Full History

Here’s how things have looked over the full length of the project:

Version	Deps (3rd-party)	Change	`node_modules` Size	Change
`v0.2.0` (2018 January) First npm release!	`×401` (`400`)	-	`51 MiB`	-
`v0.12.1` (2021 March)	`×362` (`360`)	9.7%	`68 MiB`	33.3%
`v1.0.2` (2022 August)	`×360` (`357`)	0.5%	`71 MiB`	4.4%
`v2.0.1` (2023 March)	`×213` (`208`)	40.8%	`35 MiB`	50.7%
`v3.0.0` (2024 October)	`×187` (`174`)	12.2%	`27 MiB`	22.8%
`v3.1.2` (2025 June)	`×134` (`123`)	28.3%	`21 MiB`	22.2%
`v4.0.0-alpha.1` (2025 July)	`×130` (`116`)	2.9%	`16 MiB`	23.8%
`v4.0.0-alpha.6` (2025 December)	`×105` (`89`)	19.2%	`14 MiB`	12.5%

Numbers were compiled via fresh install of Eleventy core in a new directory (with npm@11.7.0 and Node v24.11.1).
npm ls --omit=dev --all --parseable | wc -l provided the dependency count (minus one for the root directory).
node_modules folder sizes via du -m node_modules.

Securely Publishing our Packages to npm

2025-12-03T06:00:00Z

As we harden our release practices in the wake of numerous recent vulnerabilities in npm packages amongst high profile authors, it seems worthwhile to celebrate a major milestone for 11ty core and our official suite of plugins: we are now npm Access Token-free!

The @11ty/* ecosystem on npm is now fully migrated to Trusted Publishers.

If you’re interested in taking steps to improve your own security footprint, you can read more about the steps we took at No more tokens! Locking down npm Publish Workflows

Dependency Watch

In this same vein, as a project Eleventy has continuously and relentlessly focused on reducing our dependency footprint. You may remember the latest Dependency Watch on our v3.1.0 core release notes:

Version	Production Dep Count	Production Size
v3.1.0	×142	21.4 MB
v3.0.0	×187	27.4 MB
v2.0.1	×215	36.4 MB
v1.0.2	×356	73.3 MB

Very astute observers may also be eyeing the upcoming 4.0 canaries which include even more improvements to these numbers! v4.0.0-alpha.4 is 16.6 MB with ×131 deps (with more improvements on the way)!

The Eleventy Community Survey (2025)

2025-11-19T06:00:00Z

Please participate in the Eleventy Community Survey (and Suggestion Box) (2025)!

As we look to our current and future priorities, this survey offers folks from the community an opportunity to weigh in on what they’d like to see moving forward!

Looking for even more ways to help? Head over to our Enhancement Queue on GitHub and upvote feature requests that you think are worthy!
Not had your fill of surveys yet? 11ty Bundle is also running one right now as they work through a redesign!
Related: Our previous iteration of the survey: Eleventy Community Survey Results (2023)

How We Use GitHub Issues and How That’s Changing

2025-11-03T06:00:00Z

When new enhancement requests would come in to the Eleventy repository, our typical playbook would include the following:

Add a reply comment with the following:

By default this repo closes new enhancement requests and places them in a queue for folks to upvote. We do this to avoid a build-up of open issues and got this idea from the lodash project

Don’t forget to upvote the first comment with 👍 to register your vote! You can view the current enhancement backlog.

Add a needs-votes Label to the issue.
Close the issue.

This idea was via Sam Selikoff on Twitter (Archived 2018 context):

Recently I noticed Lodash's repo had 0 open issues. As an OSS maintainer I found this fascinating because Lodash is tremendously popular, and keeping issues down is notoriously difficult.

This technique was great and served us well for many years for the primary reason that it communicated that enhancement requests were classified as secondary. But it also added a nice list of things that were a possible future for the project that community folks could weigh in on.

However, it also caused some confusion too: issues were closed but unimplemented. “Is the queue considered open/quasi-open/closed?” “If I still want the feature, do I need to file it again?” Folks already participating on the issue when it was placed into the queue usually understood what was happening but new folks visiting the issue later via Search may have not seen the helpful explainer comment.

To make matters every so slightly worse, in 2022 when GitHub shipped Issue Closed Reasons they defaulted all existing closed issues as Completed. The only alternative reason was Not planned which (to me) leaned closer towards Definitely not. I would have loved to see a Yet to be Prioritized or an Maybe, if enough folks upvote it! reason.

I’m very thankful to uncenter who has gently pushed back with feedback on the above method (a few times 😅).

Leaning into GitHub Discussions

After some very productive (in real life, what?) conversations with Cory LaViska (who recently wrote an excellent blog post on this exact topic), it has become clear that perhaps GitHub Discussions (generally available in 2024) would be a more appropriate mechanism moving forward. Cory expounds thusly:

Bug Report 👉 Issue

Help/support 👉 Discussion

Ask a question 👉 Discussion

Ideas/suggestions 👉 Discussion

Waxing Philosophical 👉 Discussion

Cory adds to the list later in the post:

Actionable Piece of Work (Milestoned Task) 👉 Issue

The nice thing about GitHub Discussions is that upvoting is a first-party user interface feature in the list view. The primary downside is that we’ll lose existing vote counts in the sorted list (they’re still accessible in the full entry): it’s a level playing field moving into 2026.

The other nice thing is that GitHub Issues becomes very focused to actionable work that goes into a release, not more imagination-based planning or fielding “How does this work?”-esque education requests.

Feel free to watch as the previous queue is converted to the new Eleventy Enhancement Queue (and leave your votes!).

Our new issue funnels on both eleventy and 11ty-website will help you find the right place to be!

Appreciate y’all!

Eleventy Blog

New Sponsorship Tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter

Full Coverage

Back Build Awesome Pro and make it easier to build for the web!

Full Coverage

Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement

One Possible Editable API

Hello, World

Hello, Moon

Get notified — April 28!

Full Coverage

The Possum Mascot, now with additional Awesome

Eleventy Mascot Series

Eleventy is now Build Awesome

What does Build Awesome mean for Eleventy?

What does Build Awesome Pro mean for Eleventy?

What does this mean for the Open Collective account?

Eleventy, 2025 in Review

Highlights

Metrics

Core

Year over Year

Social

Releases

Major Releases

Thank You!

Eleventy Core Dependency Watch (2025 Edition)

Full History

Securely Publishing our Packages to npm

Dependency Watch

The Eleventy Community Survey (2025)

How We Use GitHub Issues and How That’s Changing

Leaning into GitHub Discussions

Hello, `World`

Hello, `Moon`