For discussion: How do you define a template? about 11ty-website

[edwardhorsford]

Just for clarity around my case - my confusion was around the word 'includes', not the word 'templates'. Personally, I view templates as the clearer word.

At my previous work, we tended to default to 'views' for the templates folder. This may be because we were mostly rails based.

[kleinfreund]

I would say one includes directory is fine. This is already configurable. Further separation of concerns can be accomplished by creating directories inside the includes directory with more specific names.

[zachleat]

Related: #22

[kleinfreund]

A template serves as a pattern for creating a thing. A similar term is scaffold. For example, layout templates are patterns (or scaffolds) for a document. As such, they encompass the document’s structure but not its content. You can exchange "document" with "piece of content" to make it more general. Thus, a partial template (something you would include somewhere) is a pattern for a piece of content.

Looking at programming languages in general, a template is always something that needs to be filled with something more specific, some sort of content. For example, template literals:

const userTemplate = `${userName} (@${userHandle})`;

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Bottom line regarding the specifics of a static site generator: Not all templates are included (e.g. layout templates) and not all includes are templates (e.g. a SVG or CSS file). Some static site generators solve this by separating layouts and includes. Both can contain templates, but only the ones belonging to the includes category are meant to be included.

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(I find this whole topic highly interesting. Naming things, right?)

[jevets]

I agree with @kleinfreund, template is just something to be reused, is usually sent data.

I do use _includes for files other than HTML-generating templates.

I think what could be more useful is if we could configure _includes folders, maybe allow 11ty to read from multiple folders knowing it won't output those files. This way users could easily set up a views tree or whatever other structure they'd like.

[jevets]

@kleinfreund I'm totally good w/ that, it's been working for me just fine.

[Ryuno-Ki]

A template is a piece of markup with placeholders which accepts a context object to generate the final markup.

A partial is a reusable chunk of markup. Think of it as a parametrised template.

A view uses the context object to actually execute the template rendering.

[zachleat]

Thanks for your feedback here everyone! I’m going to close this for now—if anyone has actionable steps they’d like to recommend to improve the docs from this, please file them!