The Next Phase of Eleventy: Return of the Side Project
As Eleventy continues forward on its mission to help super-fans of HTML quickly and easily build things for the web, as a responsible steward of the project I must disclose that we are no longer doing so with full time sponsorship. As such, Eleventy will be returning to its roots as a side-project and transitioning away from full time development.
Up front, I do want to make a few things clear:
- No action is required by folks building with Eleventy. Eleventy has always been independently bootstrapped and it is not changing ownership/stewardship. We march on independently as before.
- We are thankful for the year of full time development and maintenance donated to the project by Netlify and I’m proud of the things we shipped in that time: including but not limited to the stable 2.0 release.
It’s incredible to recognize that we’re nearing 6 million lifetime downloads on npm and almost 60,000 repositories on GitHub. I’m so appreciative of the community of folks that have propelled this little open source project to where it is today.
Eleventy will continue forward in a reduced (and more focused) capacity. We’ll have to make some tough prioritization decisions which may include deprecation (or community-ownership?) of some of our official plugins (as always obeying semantic versioning principles). You can help inform these decisions by taking the Eleventy Community Survey (2023).
We’ll make these decisions responsibly with the data we collect from the survey but to give a small clue as to the potential severity of the cuts the Vite, Serverless, and Edge plugins all come to mind as eligible targets right now. Eleventy has always been a build-first tool and refocusing Eleventy’s core feature set to bundler-free static site generation will allow us to continue to serve folks that have come to rely on the project.
Realistically it must be acknowledged that this news is a bit of a setback for Eleventy—but importantly I am still personally very passionate about the project’s continued survival. From the very beginning I had an expectation that Eleventy was a ten-year project and we’re on year six of that timeline.
How can you help?
First off, please take one or two minutes to fill out Eleventy’s Community Survey to help shape the future of the project (it’s a few multiple choice questions).
If your company has a vested interest in Eleventy would like to see Eleventy continue with full time development and maintenance, please get in touch.
If you have any comments or questions about this announcement, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
…and keep building for the web! ❤️
