Writing a data file to automatically create an image array for each post
So, a post with a singular photo isn’t a big deal in Markdown. Toss the image URL inside Markdown’s image syntax – or better still, use the Image plugin we’re installing in the next section – and you’re done. If you have an entire gallery of photos for a post, things get bogged down and require a lot of manual work.
For our photo blog, let’s create a way to get an array of all the photos available for a specific blog post.
The basic structure of this setup is to have a series of image files in the same directory as the post’s Markdown file. Then, we’ll use the posts directory data file to create an array from all the files. The directory data file is run for each of the documents in the directory, meaning that if we use the eleventyComputed functionality, we can compute a unique array for each post.
To start, add a few images to each of your...
