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Metadata for Posts

Details about the Metadata usage.

The attributes added to a post’s content are called metadata. They help organize and structure content in an Eleventy-based project.

As mentioned in the Eleventy Overview Post, blog posts follow a unified document approach by including metadata in each post. This forms the basis for implementing the typical structure and functionality of blogs.

While eleventy supports already many attributes out of the box or within the starter projects on github there is still room for improvement.

Eleventy Standard Attributes

The following standard metadata attributes are used as supported by eleventy using the pages’ YAML data:

title

Instead of adding the title in the first line of the markdown document, it can be written in the header. This simplifies displaying the title in the list of posts. Do not use another title line in the content.

layout

Defines the name of the layout file used to create the output file. Layout files can be found in the src/_includes folder. The post layout is defined as the default as most of the content will use this template.

tags

A list of words classifying the post. Tags are shown in the post and can be used to find other posts covering the same topic.

eleventyExcludeFromCollections

This attribute is built into eleventy can can be used to exclude a page from any collection. It is used for special pages like about.htm.

Extra Attributes supporting blogging

The following extra metadata attributes are used :

description

A sentence summarizing the article.

created

The date when the post was first published. This is used to display posts in descending order.

modified

The date when the post was last updated. This also controls when to archive the post.

draft

Setting the draft attribute to false will exclude the post from beeing created in the production build. This is useful for preparing articles before publishing.

outdated

Setting this attribute to true will exclude the post from the list of posts shown on the blog homepage. It will still appear in the complete list of posts. This attribute also triggers the display of an outdated marker on the page.

image

The image illustating the post.

imageAlt

The textual description of the image.

archiveDate

The date when the post was retired and will be shown in the list of archived posts.

changeFreq

The frequency of change reported in the sitemap.

In the post markdown file, the metadata attributes are specified in a front matter block surrounded by lines of ---, like this:

---
title: Metadata for Posts
description:  
created: 2025-03-23
tags:
  - "eleventy"
  - "nodejs"
---

Eleventy has a built-in mechanism to apply default metadata values at the folder level. The default values for metadata attributes are specified in a data file named src.11tydata.json in the src folder.

More to come

• Using date attributes in ordering and sitemap
• Archive Mechanism
• The Posts Collection
• Extending the HTML Time Element by using Single-File web Components (SFC)

See also

• Eleventy Overview Post
• Exclude special content*

Tags