First impressions
I had to build a few sites with Gatsby previous to encountering Eleventy, and had used other generators like Jekyll and Statamic in the past.
Gatsby
With Jekyll and Statamic never had issues, but really never went too deep when I worked with them, but recently I had to do a a website in Gatsby that required me to implement Contentful API, server builds and another that was completely static content.
The developer experience with Gatsby was fine, I've enjoyed myself working with React and having to learn a few things I didn't know. Gatsby has quite a few plugins, which made requirements easy to meet.
One of the concepts that I found odd, was that the main templates starts inside the <body> tag, so the only way to interact with the <head> of the document is via plugins (react-helmet) but it was quite limited and I have a hard time letting some tools make certain choices for me.
This became a problem after deploying both of those sites and realising the sites were not really, completely static. You see, the metadata was being rendered in the browser, which caused some of the tools used by our Marketing Team to fail the audits. Also I wanted to remove the generator tag and couldn't find a way to do so.
Provides drop-in support for server rendering data added with React Head.
Apparently some new options have better result, but I haven't had the chance to try them. I stil feel that I should have more control about a static site and its assets, and avoid a lot of JavaScript being loaded into the page.
Eleventy
Bliss. I feel this tool was made for me.
The flexibility of it is incredible, so much so that the first examples in the documentation were a bit jarring.
The concept of give it whatever and it outputs whatever was initially strange, but quickly got used to it and after a few tutorials I'm able to work with Nunjucks, HTML, Markdown, JavaScript and output HTML, XML and even compile CSS with it.
How the hell does this thing work?
Basically I feel I can easily do whatever I want with it and it responds exactly as I expect it to. Truly a simple, incremental tool that allows you to work your way without getting in the way of things.
Given this experience, and how it inspired me to rebuild my poor old abandoned Statamic website, I will be posting more about it soon. For now, I highly recommend anyone to try it.