James 'Dante' Midzi

Posted on May 25, 2022 Edited on Sep 16

Let's Learn 11ty Part 2: Partials, Styling & Images

#eleventy #webdev #ssg

UPDATE: September 2026

This series has been updated to more newer version. It was merely authored years ago.

In the last article we setup the basis for our site. It's bare bones, but it is a valid site. We are now going to add more to it to make it a bit nicer

Partials

Partials are those files that contain information/data repeated across the site that doesn't change a lot - navigation, footer.

It's now time to structure our site a bit better. Let's make our navigation first

In our src folder make about.md file and place this in it

---
layout: base
title: About
---

# About Page

Now in the _includes folder make a partials folder and then a _navigation.njk file in it

<!-- _includes/partials/_navigation.njk-->
<nav>
  <a href="/">Home</a>
  <a href="/about">About</a>
</nav>

Later on we will improve this navigation, but for now it's fine

Next, we'll include this navigation file in our base.njk

<body>
  {% include "partials/_navigation.njk" %}
  <main>{{content | safe}}</main>
</body>

We can repeat the same steps for the _footer.njk file

Let's run our server and see what we have so far

pnpm dev

Styling

Let's now make our site look a bit nicer. Starting with a font. We'll add a google font in our head:

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
  <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com" />
  <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin />
  <link
    href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2? 
     family=Sora:wght@300;400;500;600&display=swap"
    rel="stylesheet"
  />
  <title>My Eleventy Site - {{title}}</title>
</head>

The CSS File

We also need to add a CSS file to apply style changes. Let's make an assets folder, in it a css and then in it a style.css file

/* src/assets/css/style.css*/
*,
*::before,
*::after {
  box-sizing: border-box;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

html {
  scroll-behavior: smooth;
}

body {
  font-family: "Sora", sans-serif;
}

Above is a general reset that I use for my CSS.

We then have to add it to our head tag as well

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ '/assets/css/style.css' | url }}" />

After doing all that, and checking our site, you are going to notice something peculiar - our styles are not being applied.

If we checked our _site folder, where our site files are generated to, there is no CSS file in there

But why is that?

Pass Through Copy

If you recall when we started, I mentioned that Eleventy supports several templating languages - ways to author your site. With those file types, Eleventy automatically converts them to html.

CSS and JavaScript are not part of these languages. With them we actually have to tell Eleventy to copy those files to our output directory through a process called Pass Through Copy

Open the eleventy.config.js file and modify it to look like this:

export default function (eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("src/assets/css/style.css");

  return {
    dir: {
      input: "src",
      data: "_data",
      includes: "_includes",
      layouts: "_layouts",
    },
  };
}

NOTE: Any files that are not part of the template languages that you want to be present on the site will need to have a Pass Through Copy - that goes for images, local fonts, icons etc

Now, if we check our site, our styles are being applied.

We can now add more styles to our style sheet

*,
*::before,
*::after {
  box-sizing: border-box;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

html {
  scroll-behavior: smooth;
}

body {
  font-family: "Sora", sans-serif;
  line-height: 1.5;
}

a {
  text-decoration: none;
}

img {
  max-width: 100%;
  display: block;
}

nav {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;

  height: 3.5rem;
  width: 100%;
  background-color: black;
  color: lightgray;
}

nav > a {
  display: block;
  padding: 1rem 2rem;
  color: lightgray;
}
nav > a:hover {
  color: aqua;
}

main {
  max-width: 50rem;
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 3rem 2rem;
  min-height: 100vh;
}

main > h1 {
  margin: 2rem 0 0.5rem;
}

main > img {
  border-radius: 5px;
}

footer {
  background-color: black;
  color: lightgray;
  padding: 2rem;
}

Images

Lets add an image to our site to it doesn't look so plain

Create an images folder in assets and add an image of your choice in there
Add a Pass through copy for our images folder in eleventy.config.js

eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("src/assets/images");

Add the image to our index.md

---
layout: base
title: Home
---

![hero image](assets/images/learn.png)

# My Eleventy Site

I am a site built with [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.io/).

And here we go:

More Info

The pipe | that we used in {{content | safe }} and {{ '/assets/css/style.css' | url }} is called a filter, and we use them to decide how we want certain information to render.
Like with anything in Eleventy, how you decide to style your site is completely up to you. If you choose to write them manually like I did, I recommend you use SASS. whitep4nth3r's site is styled this way

We have done a good deal this time:

Added navigation and footer
Added styling to our site and made sure they work
Added an image to our site and made sure that works also

For now:

Here is our working repo: Part 2: Partials
Check out the docs: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/
Join the discord: https://www.11ty.dev/blog/discord/

Thank you for reading, let's connect!

Thank you for visiting this little corner of mine. My email and DMs are always open; if you want to chat or collaborate on something, shoot me a email

Where you can get hold of me:

DEV Community