Creating Custom Shortcodes to Add Mixed Media to Markdown

Now that we have a basic blog, let’s make that blog stand out with various forms of media. The flavor of Markdown that 11ty uses allows for the use of HTML, so we could embed things like YouTube videos or CodePen pens with their basic HTML embeds, but that can be a lot of repetitive markup that needs to be added and modified on each blog post. Custom shortcodes allow us to set a standard template for each of these types of media and use a simplified tag in the Markdown files of our blog posts (and in any of our templates, as well).

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following basics of 11ty’s shortcodes and set up three different shortcodes to make our blog posts more fully featured:

• What is a shortcode?
• Creating a YouTube embed
• Creating a custom blockquote with semantic HTML
• Creating a CodePen embed with a customizable display

By the end of this chapter, we’ll have a fully...