dashly is the standard-library helpers every 11ty site eventually rewrites from scratch — date formatting, RSS sanitization, HTML minification, URL validation, reading-time and excerpt generation, locale-aware number/currency/percent formatting, and more — bundled into a single tree-shakeable package.

Install

npm install --save-dev @allons-y/dashly

Heavy dependencies (prettier, html-minifier-terser, posthtml, markdown-it, postcss) are declared as optional peers. Install only the ones you use.

Quick start

// eleventy.config.js
import dashly from "@allons-y/dashly";

export default function (config) {
	config.addPlugin(dashly, {
		dateLocale: "en-GB",
		baseUrl: "https://example.com",
	});
}

Templates can immediately use:

{{ post.date | longDate }}        {# 15 January 2026 #}
{{ post.date | shortDate }}       {# Jan 2026 #}
{{ post.date | year }}            {# 2026 #}
{{ name | firstWord }}            {# "Allons-y" → "Allons-y" #}
{{ phone | digitsOnly }}          {# "(555) 123-4567" → "5551234567" #}
{{ "example.com" | validateURL }} {# https://example.com #}
{{ post.content | cleanForRSS }}  {# safe HTML for feeds #}
{{ post.content | wordCount }}    {# 842 #}
{{ post.content | readingTime }}  {# 4 #}
{{ post.content | excerpt(40) }}  {# first 40 words, ellipsised #}
<pre>{{ page | dump }}</pre>      {# pretty-printed JSON, circular-safe #}
{{ page.url | absoluteUrl }}      {# https://example.com/posts/hello/ #}
{{ post.date | timeAgo }}         {# "2 days ago" #}
{{ product.price | currency }}    {# "$1,299.00" #}
{{ survey.rate | percent }}       {# "25%" — input 0.25 #}
&copy; {% year %} Acme Corp.

A la carte

import { filters, transforms } from "@allons-y/dashly";

config.addFilter("long", filters.longDate);
config.addFilter("rss", filters.cleanForRSS);
config.addTransform("prettier", transforms.createPrettierTransform());

Or import from the narrowest subpath so unused dependencies never enter your bundle:

import { longDate } from "@allons-y/dashly/filters/dates";
import { validateURL } from "@allons-y/dashly/filters/urls";

What's in the box

Filters

| Name | Purpose | Peer dep | | --------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------- | | toISOString | ISO-8601 string for <time> and JSON-LD | – | | year | Four-digit year | – | | dateFormat | Pass-through Intl.DateTimeFormat | – | | longDate | 15 January 2026 | – | | shortDate | Jan 2026 | – | | firstWord, lastWord | Pull first/last word from a string | – | | trim, stripWhitespace, digitsOnly | Common string sanitizers | – | | keys | Safe Object.keys for templates | – | | validateURL | Force https:// on bare hostnames; pass mailto:/tel:/relative URLs through | – | | cleanForRSS | Strip scripts, embeds, permalinks, custom elements from HTML | posthtml | | renderMarkdown | Render a markdown string (with optional \n\n paragraph splitting) | markdown-it | | wordCount | Count words in a string (HTML stripped) | – | | readingTime | Estimate minutes to read (configurable wpm, default 200) | – | | excerpt | First/last N words or chars, ellipsised. Negative N → trailing slice | – | | dump / jsonify | Pretty-printed JSON for in-template debugging, circular-safe | – | | first | First element of an array, or first N when a count is given | – | | last | Last element of an array, or last N when a count is given | – | | reverse | Reverse an array or string (non-mutating, code-point safe) | – | | capitalize | Uppercase first letter, lowercase rest | – | | title | Title-case each word | – | | stripTags | Remove every HTML tag; collapse whitespace | – | | nl2br | Replace newlines with <br> for plain-text → HTML | – | | absoluteUrl | Resolve a path against baseUrl for canonical/OG/JSON-LD tags | – | | relativeDate / timeAgo | Intl.RelativeTimeFormat wrapper ("2 days ago") | – | | number | Intl.NumberFormat wrapper with locale-aware grouping | – | | currency | Localized currency formatting (default USD) | – | | percent | Localized percent formatting (fraction-aware) | – | | groupBy | Group items by key, dot-path, or selector function | – | | sortBy | Sort by key/dot-path/function, 'asc' or 'desc' | – | | chunk | Split into N-sized arrays (gallery rows, paginated grids) | – | | where | Filter by key equality, or truthiness when no value is given | – | | pluck | Project an array of objects onto a single key/path | – | | tags | Strip Eleventy system tags (all/post/…) from a tag list | – |

Transforms

| Name | Purpose | Peer dep | | ------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------- | | prettier | Format HTML/XML/SVG output | prettier | | htmlmin | Minify HTML (production-gated by default) | html-minifier-terser | | cleanAttrs | Strip eleventy:ignore="" markers left on <img> inside <picture> | – |

The postcss helper (@allons-y/dashly/transforms/postcss) is exported separately for use in addBundle or addExtension('css', …) setups.

Shortcodes

| Name | Purpose | Peer dep | | ------ | ----------------------------------------------- | -------- | | year | Current four-digit year (for footer copyrights) | – |

Plugin options

interface DashlyOptions {
	dateLocale?: string; // default 'en-US'; also used by relativeDate / number / currency / percent
	baseUrl?: string; // origin used by `absoluteUrl`, e.g. 'https://example.com'
	readingTimeWpm?: number; // default 200
	tagsExclude?: string[]; // tag names stripped by the `tags` filter; default ['all', 'post', 'posts']
	filters?: false | { exclude?: string[] };
	transforms?:
		| false
		| {
				exclude?: string[];
				prettier?: { extensions?: string[]; prettier?: PrettierOptions };
				htmlmin?: { production?: boolean; minifier?: HtmlMinifierOptions };
				cleanAttrs?: { attrs?: string[] };
		  };
	shortcodes?: false | { exclude?: string[] };
}

Pass false for any category to skip it entirely. Pass exclude to omit specific names.

Design notes

No truncate filter. Mechanical mid-sentence truncation ({{ content | truncate(100) }}) is a poor reading experience — it hides content with no signal about what was cut and often clips mid-word or mid-tag. Use excerpt instead, which trims on word boundaries and is intended as a summary affordance, not a clipping one. For trailing slices (last N words), pass a negative N: {{ content | excerpt(-20) }}.

Smart quotes. No dedicated filter; enable markdown-it's typographer: true on the renderer you pass to renderMarkdown, which handles ' → ’, -- → —, etc. for free.

Nunjucks-parity universals. Nunjucks and Liquid templates ship many of these filters natively (first, last, reverse, capitalize, etc.) — dashly registers them through addFilter so they're available in every Eleventy template engine, including JS templates and shortcodes, with consistent semantics across engines. first and last accept an optional count argument so {{ posts | first(3) }} covers the common "limit to N" case without a separate filter name.

Contributions are welcome and appreciated! Please open an issue (before submitting a pull request) if you find a bug, have a feature request, or have a question. Be sure to follow the contribution guidelines and code of conduct but most importantly, be excellent to each other. 💖

This project is licensed under the MPL-2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details. This means you can use this freely, modify as needed; changes to MPL-licensed files should be shared back under the same license.

If you find this plugin useful and would like to buy me a coffee/beer as a small thank you, I would greatly appreciate it!