Nicholas Clooney

11ty Subspace Builder v1.0.0

Launching a warp-speed Eleventy starter

v1.0.0 plants the flag for Subspace Builder: a batteries-included Eleventy 3 starter designed for fast, opinionated publishing without sacrificing flexibility. We tuned it for accessibility, clarity, and a Tachyons-powered design system you can remix in minutes.

Here is how it looks.

Screenshot of the 11ty Subspace Builder v1.0.0 layout

Table of Contents

What ships in v1.0.0

  • Eleventy 3 with Markdown-it, automatic heading anchors, and the navigation plugin baked in for rich content collections.
  • Tachyons utility classes and a theme-aware typographic scale out of the box.
  • Responsive layouts that adapt from one-column to sidebar navigation without losing context.
  • A reusable post list macro that trims excerpts sensibly and keeps your archive tidy.
  • A modern OG image generator that renders branded cards from your Markdown.

Theme previews at your fingertips

Theme switching is data-driven: _data/themes.yaml powers the options, and the layout scripts sync your choice across tabs while persisting it in localStorage. Hover previews and keyboard focus use the same system, so you can showcase skins like “Sun,” “Mint,” or “Midnight” before committing. Midtone accent colors even adjust headline flourishes automatically.

The home.njk layout wires up Eleventy Navigation to build recursive menus and wraps it in accessible markup. On narrow viewports, a hamburger toggle animates the sidebar while keeping focus states intact. Coupled with the Tachyons palette, the nav scales as your content tree grows without manual tweaking.

Authoring that stays out of the way

Content creators write Markdown and let filters do the rest. The custom excerpt helper pulls the first paragraphs or falls back to smartly trimmed text, while front matter defaults in posts/posts.json ensure every post inherits the same layout. Need to highlight a collection? Import renderPostList and the template takes care of formatting.

Automated sharing assets

npx @11ty/eleventy now triggers generate-og-images.js before every build. The script walks your posts, parses front matter with gray-matter, and renders high-contrast cards via Satori and Resvg. Cached manifests keep repeated builds fast, and you get production-ready images in assets/og/ with no manual design work.

Getting started

You can ship the starter as-is or tailor it to your brand in an afternoon.

npm install
npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

Visit http://localhost:8080, cycle through the theme previews, and start editing the Markdown in posts/. When you are ready to push to production, run:

npx @11ty/eleventy

Deploy the _site/ output to your favourite static host and you’re live.

Looking ahead

v1.0.0 is a stable foundation, and we’re already exploring additional themes, image optimisations, and richer content macros. Try it out, let us know what you build, and help shape the next release.