--- title: 'Overview' description: 'What Baseline is, who it is for, why it is a plugin, and what it gives you out of the box.' slug: 'overview' type: 'article' date: 2026-04-28T00:00:00.000Z lang: 'en' url: 'https://www.eleventy-baseline.dev/docs/introduction/overview/' --- ## What Baseline is Baseline is an Eleventy plugin that handles the scaffolding every Eleventy site ends up needing. Eleventy hands you a content pipeline and gets out of your way. That is the appeal, and also the reason every site you build with it ends up needing the same wiring underneath: directory layout, an asset pipeline, image handling, head tags, sitemap, language routing. None of it is hard. You just write it again every time. --- ## A cohesive plugin system The usual ways out are starter repos that fork once and rot, or stacks of single-purpose plugins that do not know about each other and tend to fight at the edges. Baseline handles the infrastructure layer, specifically the parts that fit together. The plugin is shaped in three layers: - **State** is your settings and options, normalised once at startup. - **Runtime**: state in motion, plus a per-page context and a registry that lets the modules read what they need without reaching across to each other. - **Modules** are the five feature plugins, self-contained slices of behaviour backed by the runtime. Your layouts in `_includes/`, your content and data in `content/` and `_data/`, your styles and scripts in `assets/`, and any plugins or filters you add yourself, all stay yours. --- ### Who this is for Baseline is written for someone who has built a handful of Eleventy sites and caught themselves wiring up the same things every time. You want those decisions made together, so they fit. You still want to own your templates, content, and design. You would rather start from a working Baseline than a blank slate, or a starter repo that forks once and goes stale. It is probably not for you if you already have a setup you like. Baseline does not replace what works; it replaces the third or fourth time you would set the same thing up from scratch. It is also not for you if you want a full framework that owns layout and content as well. Baseline is deliberately smaller than that. --- ### Why a plugin? Recipes drift. Starter repos fork once and rot. Frameworks impose more than they solve. Instead of hunting through six tutorials and reconciling them by hand each time if Eleventy defaults changes or patterns shift, you get the new version of Baseline on `npm install`. --- ## What the Baseline modules do Five modules, each wiring a distinct concern into Eleventy: {% stepsBlock "compact" %} - **[[assets]]**: the asset pipeline. One CSS entry point per directory through PostCSS, one JS entry point through esbuild, and inline filters (`inlinePostCSS`, `inlineESbuild`) for critical-path CSS or JS. - **[[head]]**: a `` placeholder that gets replaced with a sorted, deduped element list. Charset, viewport, title, description, robots, canonical, hreflang, plus the SEO payload (Open Graph, Twitter, JSON-LD). You drop the placeholder in your layout once. - **[[multilang]]**: directory-based multilingual support. Per-language collections, hreflang, a translation map, and the standard i18n filters (it wraps Eleventy's `I18nPlugin`). Opt-in. - **[[navigator]]**: runtime-introspection surface and public read surface. A `phpinfo()`-style virtual page that dumps current build state (on in development by default), the globals and filters used to build it, and the `_navigator` global (`{ nodes, edges, backlinks }`) for cross-page reads of the content graph. - **[[sitemap]]**: an XML sitemap. Every page is included unless you exclude it. When `multilang` is active, you get per-language sitemaps plus an index. {% endstepsBlock %} Threading the modules together is **page context** at `_pageContext`: a normalised per-page object the head, multilang, and sitemap modules all read from internally. Your templates can read it too. See the [[page-context | page context reference]]. --- ## Baseline content helpers Alongside the modules, Baseline registers a small set of additions the moment you load it. These are always on because they are too small to be worth opting in or out of: {% stepsBlock "compact" %} - **Filters**: `markdownify`, `relatedPosts`, `isString`. See the [[filters | filters reference]]. - **Globals**: a date-formatting helper, plus the `_baseline` data tree (`env`, `features`, `paths`) that templates can read at any time. See the [[globals | globals reference]]. - **An [[image-shortcode | image shortcode]]** built on top of [eleventy-img](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/image/): AVIF and WebP, responsive widths, lazy loading. Alt text is required; the build warns if you skip it. {% endstepsBlock %} And three behaviours that need no configuration at all: {% stepsBlock "compact" %} - A **drafts preprocessor**: any template with `draft: true` in front matter is excluded from production builds. - A **dev image pipeline**: `eleventy-img` is wired up for in-flight transforms during `--serve`. - **Passthrough copy** for the `static/` directory: anything in there is copied to the site root as-is. {% endstepsBlock %} The full surface lives in the [[core-reference | core reference]] chapter. --- ## Stability and scope Baseline is in active development. Versions ship as `0.1.0-next.X` and that is a deliberate signal: things may shift between releases, and you should pin a version when you build something serious on top. The five modules above are the supported surface today. The head module also emits a full SEO payload: canonical, Open Graph, Twitter cards, and a JSON-LD graph, configured through `settings.seo` and per-page front matter. If something in the docs claims a behaviour you cannot reproduce, the docs are probably wrong. Please [open an issue](https://github.com/apleasantview/eleventy-plugin-baseline/issues). --- ## Where to go next - The [[concept | concept]] chapter for the mental model and community-seeded conventions. - The [[quickstart | quickstart]] for a checklist that gets you a running site. - The [[simple-baseline-site | simple-site]] tutorial for a guided walk through the same checklist with reasoning. - The [[architecture-snapshot | architecture snapshot]] for a deeper look at the three layers if you want it. Already have an Eleventy site you want to graft Baseline onto? See [[integrate-eleventy-base-blog]].