Skip to main content

Develop Site

Alright, with setup and configuration out of the way we can get into the more fun part and bring our store to life. For this we'll need a main page that lists our products directories as categories and a page for the product details of the selected product. In addition, we'll need to hook up our shopping cart and checkout with Snipcart. So before we head into this next section, head over to Snipcart and create your account. Once the account is created, select the Install Snipcart under the tab with the checkbox 1/8 (more on Snipcart in a minute).

Main Layout

All of the pages we create should share an html skeleton with site navigation and other base information. Let's start by creating our 11ty main layout using one of the many template engines supported by 11ty, Liquid. When layouts are referenced in 11ty, it looks for an _includes folder inside our input directory (in our case src). Create a file src/_includes/main.liquid and populate it with the following:

<!doctype html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>{{ title }}</title>

<meta charset="utf-8" />

<meta name="description" content="{{ description }}" />

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/main.css" />

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://app.snipcart.com" />

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://cdn.snipcart.com" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.snipcart.com/themes/v3.3.0/default/snipcart.css" />

<script async src="https://cdn.snipcart.com/themes/v3.3.0/default/snipcart.js"></script>

<div hidden id="snipcart" data-api-key="YOUR_PUBLIC_API_KEY"></div>
</head>

<body>
<header>
<p id="site-logo">
<a href="/">Fathym Acme Shop</a>
</p>

<span class="snipcart-checkout material-icons">shopping_cart</span>
<span>(</span>
<span class="snipcart-items-count"></span>
<span>)</span>
</header>

{{ content | safe }}
</body>
</html>

This is standard html setup with only a few minor adjustments. You'll notice the title and description values within double curly braces, this is how data is injected with Liquid. The content value is a special variable provided by 11ty and is how layouts are nested inside of each other, its | safe filter simply lets Liquid know that no html escaping is necessary.

The other additions are in place to support some of the Snipcart experience. For starters, the Snipcart script, styles and preconnects are installed in the <head> tag of the html. Take a moment to grab your test API Key from the Snipcart dashboard by navigating to your Account -> API Keys and replace YOUR_PUBLIC_API_KEY with the public test API key. Next you'll notice the html (<span class="snipcart-checkout material-icons">shopping_cart</span>) that is responsible for opening the shopping cart, Snipcart will look for the snipcart-checkout class name so it could be in a <div> but here we put it in a <span> along with a shopping cart icon from material icons.

This wraps up our main layout, now we can dive into creating our pages.

Products List

Creating pages is very straightforward, simply create a new file at src/index.liquid. Then use the following as your homepage contents:

---
title: Acme shop with Fathym, 11ty, Forestry, and Snipcart
description: Simple demo of an e-commerce site.
layout: main.liquid
---

<h1 id="category-title">Products</h1>

<ul id="products">
{% for product in collections.product %}
<li>
<a href="{{ product.url }}">
<img alt="" src="{{ product.data.image }}" />

{{ product.data.name }}
</a>

<p class="price">{{ product.data.price | money }}</p>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

A full understanding of the Liquid templating language is outside the scope of this guide. What you will notice is that in the front matter (the part framed in by '---') the title and description needed by our main layout, and the layout main.liquid lets 11ty know to render our page within the main layout. You'll see the | money filter which formats the price into a currency.

The way that 11ty works, collections.product is a special property that contains an array of any document tagged with product. If you've already tried running the site, and didn't see any products, that's because we haven't tagged any yet. It may seem like a daunting task to apply these tags manually to every file, and 11ty agrees. So instead, let's use the data cascading feature by creating a new file src/products/products.json that 11ty will use, for all documents in the products folder, to apply default tags:

{
"layout": "product.liquid",
"tags": "product"
}

Go ahead and try out your site by running npm start, though don't expect anything too stunning. You'll need to fix up our CSS to get the site looking like you want, start by creating a new file at assets/css/main.css and then filling it in with the css of your choosing. If you're feeling uninspired, you can try out our basic css.

header {
align-items: center;
background: cadetblue;
color: white;
display: flex;
justify-content: space-between;
padding: 1em 2em;
z-index: 10;
box-shadow: 0 0 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);
}
body {
font-family: sans-serif;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
background-color: #252525;
}
#site-logo{
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 250%;
margin: 0;
}
#site-logo a{
text-decoration: none;
color: white;
}
.price {
font-family: sans-serif;
font-weight: 500;
margin: 0;
}
#products {
color: white;
display: grid;
grid-gap: 2em 2em;
grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(325px, 1fr));
margin: 3em 1em;
list-style: none;
padding: 0;
text-align: center;
padding: 5px;
margin: 10px;

}
#products img {
border-radius: 15px;
}
#products li{
background-color: #424242;
border-radius: 25px;
padding: 20px;
}
#products a {
color: white;
display: block;
font-size: 125%;
font-weight: 300;
text-decoration: none;
}
#products img {
display: block;
height: auto;
margin: 0 auto .5em;
max-width: 100%;
}
#category-title {
color: white;
font-weight: 300;
padding-left: 25px;
}
#product-view {
color: white;
margin: 3em 1em;
}
#product-view h1 {
border-bottom: 3px solid currentColor;
font-size: 150%;
margin: 0 0 .5rem;
}
#product-view h2 {
margin: 1rem 0 0;
font-size: 100%;
font-weight: 500;
}
#product-view h2 + p {
margin-top: 0;
}
#product-view img {
height: auto;
max-width: 100%;
}
#product-view label {
font-size: 110%;
font-weight: 500;
}
#product-view select {
border: 0;
border-bottom: 1px solid currentColor;
font: inherit;
font-weight: normal;
}
@media (min-width: 40em) {
#product-view {
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
}
#product-view img {
margin-right: 1em;
max-width: 40vw;
}
#product-view .body {
max-width: 30em;
}
}


With the main page complete, let's set our sights on the product details page.

Product Details

The last step is to build the layout for our product details page. We hooked part of this up in the products.json file, now all that's left is to create the file src/_includes/product.liquid and fill it with the following:

---
title: {{ name }}
layout: main.liquid
---

<div id="product-view">
<img alt="" src="{{ image }}" height="959" width="640" />

<form class="body">
<h1>{{ name }}</h1>

<p class="price">{{ price | money }}</p>

<p>{{ description }}</p>

<button class="snipcart-add-item"
data-item-id="{{ name }}"
data-item-price="{{ price }}"
data-item-url="{{ page.url }}"
data-item-description="{{ description }}"
data-item-image="{{ image }}"
data-item-name="{{ name }}"
>
Add to cart
</button>
</form>
</div>

Much like before, we are using the main layout to load in our product details and setting the title to the name of the product. Everything else is pretty standard, with the exception of the <button class="snipcart-add-item"...</button> html which is the Snipcart hook for adding an item into a shopping cart. The page variable is an 11ty hook into the current page's information (such as url). The use of Snipcart's data-item-* attribute instructs Snipcart to send any other data collected in the form along in the cart. This would allow you to add any additional form inputs like weight or description. Snipcart will also do a check against the page.url during checkout to ensure that a user hasn't opened up the dev console and changed the price of any items.