Incremental Content Management with Laravel and Eleventy

Source: Dev.to

Overview

This is a recording of a talk I presented at the 11ty Meetup on February 4th, 2026. I tell the story of how I used Eleventy to quickly add a blog to an existing website and application originally built with Laravel. It worked so seamlessly, I went from request to working solution in about 30 minutes. After a year and a half of use, what initially felt like an unusual idea has turned out to be rather pleasant to work with.

I think there’s a lot of unexplored territory when it comes to combining the simplicity of a static site generator and the power of a full application framework. By mixing and matching tools I believe it’s not only possible, but in many cases preferable, to manage a website’s content without a monolithic CMS like WordPress. Instead, we build content management functionality in pieces, constructing the website in such a way that it does the heavy lifting of pulling disparate sources together for you.

I’ve started referring to this as Incremental Content Management.

This 30‑minute talk focuses on one example of this approach.