5.8 introduced pre theme Templates to classic themes where we could easily see the list of designs and preload them before themes, and 6.0 took them away again—a weird decision if you are trying to get people to use new technology, editors or themes. Since then, major performance issues with the editor.
I’m now focusing on building initial sites with the Eleventy framework, which doesn’t make up for my lack of creativity or motivation to post anything.
Why Eleventy?
I have no idea, it just looked like it supported much more than the rest and allowed you to run the site in its own little server for testing without too much fuss. While Publii was great being in a tiny program, it lacked features. Eleventy I can try and remember to code in by hand into templates I can call in via shortcodes. As Eleventy is mostly templates anyway, I can create some pages, and call those templates in to do their thing, for example, a contact page form, a gallery, special seasonal pages etc.
What will be missing if I deploy Eleventy based sites?
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Multi-user/device posts and drafting.
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Design of posts
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Fancy images and placement
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Helpful plugins
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the bloat
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the security issues/hacking attempts
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April fools designs will be a little tricker
I’ll likely have a few ideas during transitioning to Eleventy, like post drafts can still be written in WordPress by other users and then pulled by JSON into Eleventy.
Maybe AI/ChatGPT can help write small bits like SEO etc, there are already some plugins made for similar things for it.