complite
eleventy getting-started

Welcome to complite

by Your Name · · 3 min read · Updated:

You're looking at the first post of a new site built with complite — a complete Eleventy blogging solution for people who write in Markdown and ship static HTML.

This post is a quick tour of what's included and how to get started.

What you get

Out of the box, complite ships with:

  • Eleventy 3 with ESM configuration and Liquid templates
  • Five layouts: home, blog archive, article, author profile, and a generic page
  • Dark mode that works without JavaScript, using a three-layer CSS priority system
  • RSS feed with an XSL stylesheet for human-readable browser rendering
  • JSON-LD structured data for search engines
  • Full-text search powered by SQLite and PHP with fuzzy matching
  • Syntax highlighting via Prism, loaded only on pages that need it
  • Contact form backed by a PHP handler with honeypot spam protection

Project structure

The source lives in src/. Data files in src/_data/ control the site's identity. Layouts and partials live in src/_includes/. Blog posts go in src/blog/posts/.

src/
├── _data/          # site.json, users.json, person.json
├── _includes/
│   ├── layouts/    # base, home, article, blog, author, contact, page
│   └── partials/   # nav, footer, post-card, pagination, ...
├── blog/posts/     # your markdown posts
├── static/         # CSS, favicons, images
└── index.liquid    # homepage

Writing your first post

Create a new .md file in src/blog/posts/ with front matter like this:

---
title: "My First Post"
description: "A short description for search engines and social cards."
date: 2026-05-21
author: admin
tags:
  - writing
---

Then write your content in Markdown. Eleventy handles the rest — layout, navigation, RSS, sitemap, and social cards are all automatic.

Configuration

Edit three files to make complite yours:

  1. src/_data/site.json — site title, URL, description, email
  2. src/_data/users.json — author profiles (name, bio, social links)
  3. src/_data/person.json — JSON-LD identity for search engines

Running locally

npm install
npm run dev

The dev server starts at http://localhost:8080 with live reload. For production builds:

npm run build

This minifies HTML, inlines CSS/JS, and outputs everything to _site/.

That's the tour. Delete this post when you're ready, or keep it as a reference. Happy writing.