BEN is a easier way to share you projects with others.

This is a solution for those of you that needs a place to showcase their projects or experience in a certain field without all the affiliate costs that comes with traditionally blogging solutions like WorldPress.

Tech stack:

1. Bootstrap 5.2
2. Eleventy
3. NetlifyCMS

Main advantages:

• Easy to customize the website being build form the ground up with Bootstrap 5.2
• Nice admin panel fully customizable
• With the help of EleventyCMS(Eleventy Docs) you don't need to touch HTML files every time when you are gonna write an article(this is generated by Eleventy)
• You can work very easy in teams if you want.
• You aren't vendor locked. EleventyCMS its an open source project that let you deploy anywhere,but for a better integration I recommend using GitHub and Netlify PaaS.
• In the admin panel you can write the article using the rich text editor or if you already know Markdown you can use that.

Admin Panel

In the image above it's an example of a fully configured admin panel where you can create articles, edit the site settings and the Workflow tab that allow you do review the article before you are gonna make it public. Here is a demo of the admin panel.

Adding new posts

All the field that appear below can be configure from /src/admin/config.yml.Putting this out of the way some of the options of the fields that doesn't appear below are: lists, map, color and code.Read more

Customizing

At this moment you can change the navbar links and the branding.

Run locally

Clone the project on local machine

  git clone  https://github.com/BlitzStudio/blog-template.git

Go to the project directory

  cd my-project

Install dependencies

  npm install

Run the Netlify Cms Server. It' s required for the local admin panel.

  npx eleventy-cms-proxy-server

Start the server

  npm run serve

Start coding

  code .

The web server will run on localhost and you can find the admin panel here.

If you are satisfied with the changes made you can push the changes to your Github fork and then deploy to Netlify.

Deployment

I am gonna present the Netlify way because this is my preferred one because comes with GitHub authentication, but as I said you can deploy anywhere and to secure the /admin endpoint you can use Cloudflare Zero Trust platform to achieve enhance security.

1. Fork the project from GitHub
2. Clone the project on your local machine
3. Make the required changes, until you are satisfied with the changes
4. Remove that line from /src/admin/config.yml(line 10) before pushing the changes to your fork.

local_backend: true

5. Add a new site on the Netlify Dashboard:
   1. Chose you git provider and import the project.
   2. Go on the site settings and Enable Identity and then enable the Git Gateway.Optionally you can enable an external provider like GitHub to login on the admin panel with that.