Demo 11ty Previous and Next Links

(Thanks to @khoivan88 for the challenge in how to explain how all this works for those new to 11ty)

Simple demo for Previous & Next links in 11ty to help several posters in the 11ty Discord community.

Demo site: https://demo-11ty-prev-next.netlify.app/

Install Using Template

1. Click the Use this template button above to create a clean copy of this repo in your Github account.
2. Clone your clean copy to your local dev environment.
3. cd into your new directory
4. npm install
5. npm run dev to fire up the 11ty dev server
6. Open your browser to http://localhost:8080

Important Parts to Understand

Running Nunjucks code in Markdown (.md) files

.eleventy.js

markdownTemplateEngine : "njk"

Setting the Template Engine for markdown (.md) files allows us to run Nunjucks code in our /src/index.md file so we can loop through the Covers & Posts Collections to create the links to those entries.

---

Automatic Collections

We don't have to specify Collections in the .eleventy.js file for something as simple as this demo.

/src/covers/covers.json setting tags: covers automatically creates the "covers" Collections.
And tells 11ty to use the /src/_includes/layouts/cover.njk template for every Entry so we don't have to set that Frontmatter in each content .md file.

/src/posts/posts.json setting tags: posts automatically creates the "posts" Collections.
And tells 11ty to use the /src/_includes/layouts/post.njk template for every Entry so we don't have to set that Frontmatter in each content .md file.

We can then loop through the "covers" and "posts" Collections in /src/index.md and generate links to the Covers and Posts entries.

---

Generating Previous and Next links in the Entry Details

Now in /src/_includes/layouts/cover.njk and /src/_includes/layouts/post.njk we can set previousPost and nextPost variables using 11ty's built in Filters: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/filters/collection-items/

• getPreviousCollectionItem(page)
• getNextCollectionItem(page)

/src/_includes/layouts/cover.njk

{% set previousPost = collections.covers | getPreviousCollectionItem(page) %}
{% set nextPost = collections.covers | getNextCollectionItem(page) %}

/src/_includes/layouts/post.njk

{% set previousPost = collections.posts | getPreviousCollectionItem(page) %}
{% set nextPost = collections.posts | getNextCollectionItem(page) %}

Then use simple conditionals to display (or not) the Previous and Next links:

/src/_includes/layouts/cover.njk & post.njk

    <div>
      {% if previousPost %}
        <p><a href="{{ previousPost.url }}">← {{ previousPost.data.title }}</a></p>
      {% endif %}
    </div>

    <div>
      {% if nextPost %}
        <a href="{{ nextPost.url }}">{{ nextPost.data.title }} →</a>
      {% endif %}
    </div>

---

UPDATE: Generating Previous and Next links within 11ty Navigation

In the Covers and Posts markdown files you'll notice there is no date: Frontmatter. Because I created each of the files in order, pagination simply works based on the file creation date.

In the new Chapters section, where 11ty Navigation is used (https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/navigation/) we naturally want to link from one Chapter to it's Sections and to the next Chapter. In order to do this automatically, we just need to add date: values to the Frontmatter on those markdown files, with the timestamp incremented.

So you can see I simply incremented the timestamps by 1 minute in each of the Chapter & Section pages.

11ty Navigation will then properly construct Previous and Next links without any special code.

NOTE: You'll just have to remember to manually adjust the timestamp if you ever want to insert Sub-Section pages or re-order the Sections. Would be every easy if you just increment each file by Hour or even Day.