Consider naming templates to content

[pawelurbanski]

When moving from a different CMS or an SSG it is very confusing to learn about Eleventy's templates. While the idea is very solid the naming introduces mental/cognitive effort to understand. Eleventy operates with templates which can be static Markdown or HTML files, templates which can be dynamic documents that render to certain format and then regular static files. Layouts are the first thing that are closely related to templates understood by the developer and web community. I understand that it would require alot of code refactoring or maybe not so... The rough idea to consider would be as follows in terms of organization:

• Themes/layouts with templates understood as JS/HBS/ other rendering-engine-based files,
• Content files/sources including Markdown/HTML/JSON, including the data files transformed by the former,
• Static files such as CSs/JS/images/audio/video.

The idea is very solid, but the naming was very confusing at the beginning and it is not so easy to become familiar with the concept when getting started with Eleventy.

[renestalder]

I can only agree on that. That was by far one of the most confusing things about 11ty and it's rather difficult to wrap the head around it if you are used to everything else, where a template simply is a template which renders content and not the content/data file itself.

[nielsbom]

I'm a new user of 11ty and the word "template" for a Markdown file with just static content in it was very confusing. Renaming them to "content files" or something like that would help a lot.

[nielsbom]

I made a very small pull request on the first page of the documentation as a band-aid for this confusing use of the term.