11tyCMS: Metadata Editor, 11ty Build Integration & Design Refinements

posted on Jul 11, 2025

Well here we are again with another 11tyCMS update! Things are coming along very nicely since the last update. Let's take a look at what's happened:

📋 Metadata

As promised in the previous post, I've finally made a start on the metadata section! There's now a new "Add new property" button, which allows you to add a new field to your post's front matter. Once pressed, it gives you a textbox and a dropdown for the name of the key and its' type respectively:

Once you've entered your keys name and type, you'll get to input the value and save or remove it:

It works beautifully!! Obviously, the design has a long way to go, but right now I just want it functioning.

As of right now, the supported types are

• String

• Boolean

But in the future I will add support for dates and other types as requested.

The next task with the metadata editor though, is to have an edit option, as right now, you have to delete a metadata field (button is visible on hover) and re-add it again... Not very user friendly!

Once the welcome wizard is up and running, I'll make sure to have a section where the user can define the default set of fields they'd like to appear whenever they create a new post. I think that'd be really nice.

Loving what we have here so far.

💊 The site info pill

As you can see, in the top left, we now have a functioning site info pill! It grabs your favicon from your sites media folder, and the title from your data folder. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to handle this... Whether we should have a seperate folder inside of the data folder called eleventyCMS for 11tyCMS related stuff like that, or whether we should try and grab it from the title headers in templates, or whever that data is coming from?

My idea right now is to get the user to enter the name of the site in the welcome wizard when I've made it. Some more thinking to be done here...

Eventually, you'll be able to hover on the pill and itll show a "log out" button to change sites. Clicking on it will also lead you to the dashboard for the site, where you can see stats on your website, along with settings for build and publish commands etc.

🔨 Build support

We can finally trigger a site build within 11tyCMS! Exciting stuff. As you can see, toward the bottom of the sidebar we have 2 buttons:

Unfortunately, the publish button is merely a placeholder for now. But eventually, the plan will be to make some shell scripts that can adapt to the users publishing method of choice in the welcome wizard. It'll hopefully support WebDAV, SSH and FTP.

The build button simply runs the npx @eleventy/11ty command to build the site and give you all the files to upload. Sadly, there's no feedback for what's going on or whether the build was successful yet. But eventually, once I have terminal integration setup, it will show you the build logs. There will also be a simplified traffic light system at the bottom of the sidebar to show you the status of builds.

I also want the ability to start the eleventy web server from there too maybe, but I dont know if I should have 2 rows of buttons at the bottom there? Tricky to say.

🖼️ Further design refinement

So further design refinement has taken place. You'll see that the back button is placed on the left of the title input in the editor now.

The editor bar has also received some love: the image upload button now has an icon and is stylised. It still needs more work, but looks much less crappy now its colored and rounded!

In the post list area, you can see that we now have a proper styled add button in the top right! Things are starting to look a lot more... Real! And exciting.

Conclusion

So far so good! I'm very very excited at how complete this is starting to feel. In all honesty, I think the next step is to think about releasing this as an alpha build in the very near future. I wouldn't be surprised if 11tyCMS ends up being ready for alpha once I make the next post here. However, before alpha hits, I've got a few annoying bugs to iron out, but once that's done? There's no reason y'all cant start using it right away!

But outstanding tasks are:

• Welcome wizard

• Dashboard page

• Fixing bugs

  • Title field isnt editable after file create

  • Sometimes the images in the editor disappear when closing and reopening a post

  • Milkdown seems to parse markdown within backticks

But so far, so great!

That's everything for today.

Over and out xo