Elva

Elva is a multilingual, clean, green Eleventy (11ty) starter theme by Scott Evans that gives new web projects a solid foundation with a built-in CMS. It takes a repository of content, themes, and configuration and builds a production-ready static site to a dist folder. The template runs on Eleventy, a JavaScript-based static site generator, and is actively maintained by its author.

What is Elva?

Elva is a multilingual, clean, green Eleventy (11ty) starter theme created by Scott Evans, designed to provide a solid foundation for new web projects. It outputs a production-ready static website to a dist folder, and includes a built-in CMS (Front Matter CMS) for content management. The template runs on Eleventy and is actively maintained, with a demo available at elva.scott.ee.

Key Features

• Multilingual support — Built on Eleventy's i18n plugin, with a CLI to add, remove, list, and set default languages, plus translation key syncing.
• Front Matter CMS — Includes a pre-configured Front Matter CMS setup for VSCodium or Visual Studio Code, exposing all front matter in the UI for content editing.
• Performance tools — Optimized CSS, JS, and HTML; responsive images with lazy loading and modern formats (AVIF, WebP); critical CSS via eleventy-plugin-bundle; optional Photon CDN support.
• Accessibility — Dark and light mode, skip links, and ARIA hints out of the box.
• Standards and feeds — RSS feed with XSLT styling, JSON feed, sitemap, web manifest for PWA, humans.txt, robots.txt, and a filter to discourage AI bots.
• CLI for common tasks — npm run cli provides an interactive menu and shortcuts for setup, languages, content, blogroll, collections, and translations.
• Search API — Generates a dist/api/search.json index; any content tagged with _search appears in the search results.
• Useful integrations — Eleventy Fetch, Eleventy Navigation, syntax highlighting, simplified embeds for YouTube and Vimeo, Alpine.js, and open graph image generation.

Who is it for?

• Eleventy developers who want a modern, multilingual starter with CMS support instead of building from scratch.
• Bloggers and content teams who prefer editing content with a GUI (via Front Matter CMS) while keeping a static site output.
• Agencies and freelancers who need to ship client sites quickly with multilingual capability, accessibility features, and performance optimizations included.

What can you do with Elva?

• Set up a new project — Clone the repo, run npm install, then use npm run cli setup site to configure site settings and languages.
• Manage content — Use Front Matter CMS in your editor to create and edit posts with front matter; the CLI also offers content add, remove, import, and open graph regeneration commands.
• Build for production — Run npm run build:prod to generate a production build in the dist folder, or set NODE_ENV=production for hosting.

How does Elva work?

Elva separates the project into /themes for theme files, /content for site content, and /elva for core functionality. After cloning the repository, you install dependencies with npm install, run npm run dev for local development at http://localhost:8080, and npm run build:prod for a production-ready build. The template includes a personalisation checklist for configuring site settings, languages, images, and themes.