Make plugin creation more structured to make discovery easier

[chrisdmacrae]

A lot of frameworks are now namespacing their plugins as a requirement, to make discovery easier and installation more magical.

E.g, gatsby requires:

• gatsby-source-*
• gatsby-transformer-*
• gatsby-plugin-*

etc

Parcel requires parcel-plugin-*.

I propose eleventy does the same thing, with eleventy-plugin-* or 11ty-plugin-*.

[chrisdmacrae]

@zachleat I'm going to draft an update to the plugins page detailing how to develop a bunch of different plugins.

I'll also pull in any found plugins on NPM and list them.

[zachleat]

Beautiful idea. I’d stick with exclusively using eleventy-plugin-* though if we can.

[Ryuno-Ki]

You could even steal copy ChaiJS' approach and list plugins automatically: chaijs/chaijs.github.io#173 (comment)

I looked around some more about how that scraping could be done and discovered npmsearch.

A query could look like https://npmsearch.com/query?q=eleventy-plugin&fields=keywords,name (for some reason, neither homepage nor repository returns a meaningful value.

I wouldn't expect problems if you don't jam their service … asking them is a nice gesture, though :-)

[Ryuno-Ki]

@zachleat Could you setup a 11ty/awesome-eleventy GitHub repo where we could PR plugins in?

[chrisdmacrae]

Heads up -- this is in the works, will try and push up a viable MVP asap.

[Ryuno-Ki]

@chrisdmacrae As stop-gap I went through npm and listed packages I found there.

[xplosionmind]

Hey all, I am resuscitating this issue after five years (😲) because I would really love to create some simple plugins. Unfortunately, my knowledge of JavaScript is very minimal, and I am not able to reverse-engineer Eleventy’s APIs and structure to understand where to start, what are the arguments passed, what is returned and where, etc…

In short, I lack all the basics, and I believe it would be super valuable if there could be an explanatory article (or video) that could go through the essentials to understand how Eleventy works behind the scenes.

Any links or suggestions for Eleventy plugin creation 101?

[zachleat]

Sorry for the late reply but this exists here: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/create-plugin/