Changelog

Improvement

Many improvements were worked on behind the scenes. From backend related tweaks to keep things snappy to fixes to improve the editor.

New

You can now set the language any code-block should use, which will render the markdown as “```js”.

New

One of the most requested feature is here: basic support for MDX components. Components in your content are now shown in a special way in the editor and you can easily change their props. Over the coming weeks support will be expanded with adding existing components to your content via the / shortcut as well.

New

Another often requested feature is to invite your team by email. Previously you could share a link with your team where they could sign up. While quick and easy, it has some (security) downsides if you leave the link lingering. Now you can choose to invite your team one-by-one with specific authorisation levels.

Improvement

Previously the site's settings were only available to the account's owner. Now they are also available to administrators in your account.

New

Love data? Add a table! Which is now easy in the editor. Just make sure your static site generator of choice does support them.

Improvement

You can now see a preview of your uploaded images in the Content Settings.

Bugfix

Site setting's would get reset to the defaults when you added a new Content Type. Ugh! Not anymore!

New

When your team publishes a lot content, the calendar is a great way to see it all. But you can now also get a weekly, every Monday, or a monthly, every first Monday, email in your inbox with an overview of all content published the previous period.

You can enable them, along with all other email notifications, from your Profile settings.

Improvement

Content in the (kanban) Workflow looks a bit more card-like now.

Improvement

The Content Type set up modal looks a bit flashier now. 🌈

New

Upon scheduling new content, a list is shown with the content scheduled for the same day. Great to see if you scheduled for the correct (or not!) day.

Bugfix

Various bugfixes to the editor (it never stops!)

Introducing Workflow. A kanban-like board view that allows you to move your content in a more fine-grained way. From a little idea to published, via QA and approved.

With ever more bigger teams (writing more content) starting to use Spinal, it's a great feature to help them manage their content in a better way.

But also smaller teams enjoy using the new Workflow feature:

The new workflow feature allows for a way better overview where things are!

Read the blog or docs for more.

New

New email notifications are available: when content is scheduled or published and when a new member joined your Spinal account.

New

Re-sync your content. Sometimes you just want to restart things (or sometimes content behaves a bit odd). With one click of a button, you can now re-sync the content from your GitHub repo to your Spinal account. Just like you set it up the first time.

New

Enable or disable certain formatting options in the editor's toolbar. Many customers use their content's title as the page heading so having a h1 in the toolbar doesn't make sense. Or maybe you don't want the option to have bullet lists. Disable it! You can set these up per Content Type.

Improvement

Various UI fixed to keep things looking sharp

Improvement

Talking about formatting options, you can now also insert some “embed” code right from the toolbar, like a YouTube video. Upon select, a model opens where you can paste your snippet right into your editor. What's more is that the editor now shows a preview of the embed as well!

New

In the content's info panel there's now a Contributors section. It currently only shows who the content author is, but soon list a bit more too! 🤫

Improvement

Snippets now allow a {cursor} value. When added, it will move the cursor upon inserting the snippet.

Bugfix

Lots of smaller and bigger fixes around the editor to keep things running smooth.

New

Group content by “select”-type frontmatter values. This is a great way to visually mimic your static site’s set up in your content overview. Pro-tip: you can re-order the groups by dragging/dropping!

New

Keyboard shortcuts are here! Next to the Global Command Menu you can now also navigate your Spinal dashboard with Keyboard shortcuts. Type ? in the app to see all available options.

New

When you check the Keyboard shortcuts help modal, you will notice a shortcut to hide the navigation bar (it’s [). This allows you view the editor in full screen. Removing even more distractions from an already beautiful, minimal UI.

Improvement

Previously the heading formatting buttons weren’t highlighted on the toolbar. On the light-themed toolbar nothing was highlighted at all!This made it especially difficult to distinguish the headings. This is now fixed.

Improvement

It is not needed a lot, but previous customers can now still access the Stripe’s customer portal from their account settings. Useful to get those previous invoices.

New

The Personal plan’s limit have been increased. From 2 to 3 Content Types and a content limit of 1000. Related: on August, 1st the (one-time)price will increase from $99 to $149. So if you were on the fence to buy, now is the time!

New

The toolbar now features an image option. Because sometimes that’s just quicker to insert an image.

Improvement

Some UI improvements to the URL field in the formatting toolbar.

Improvement

Various little UI tweaks to keep things looking as sharp as possible.

One of the most requested features is finally here!

Since Spinal’s launch you connected with your GitHub through oAuth. This made it possible to quickly ship (and brought Spinal where it is today). But it also came with some pretty big downsides.

Now there’s an official GitHub app for Spinal. It’s available, by default, for all new customers. But if you already use Spinal you are encouraged to switch to the new GitHub app.

Read all about it on the blog.

New

Filter your content even more! When you had enabled more columns in your content overview, you know (or maybe not) you can filter by those values by selecting it.

Now you can also filter your content in more ways:

• content with unpublished changes (based on the content’s changes)
• content with comments
• content by an author

The “author” field is a new concept in Spinal, and might be confusing if you have an “author” Frontmatter key. Here it is in essence the team member who created the content. Others might have edited the content, but only the member who created is assigned “author”.

New

You can now change the git branch Spinal uses to push to. By default (and when empty) this is the ”default branch” from GitHub. Change it in your account’s settings.

Bugfix

The validation message for the filename upon publishing went rogue sometimes, this is now fixed.

Improvement

The content’s anchor (the header) would be cut off after a certain amount of characters, making it impossible to edit it. This was a left-over UI from before the anchor was editable. Now it will span multiple lines if needed.

New

After adding the “default value” for all text and string input types, you can now mark these as “read only” too. This will show the field in the Content settings, but editors can not change it.

Bugfix

When you would enter an incorrect date (eg. 2023-24-25) in your Content settings the app would blow up. Making it impossible to edit the content. Yikes! This is now fixed.

Improvement

Some tweaks behind-the-scenes around database connections to minimise issues that arose after a big influx of new users/customers.

Improvement

Various improvements to keep the app snappy and looking sharp.

New

You can now delete your own account. Sounds ludicrous, but 12+ months in and you still had to email to get your account deleted. Now you can do so with a click of a button. And as a reminder: Spinal is not in the business of collecting data, so we purge empty and inactive accounts (after some time).

New

New, more collaborative permissions. Previously content types, and thus it’s content, was hidden if you didn’t have access to it. This limited collaboration. By default now all content types, including its content is visible to all team members. But only if you have access will you able to write and publish content.

New

The team page is now accessible by default. Useful to see who is part of the team. Note that only admins can create invite links and update team roles.

Improvement

All dates and times now show what time zone these are, which is UTC by default.

Improvement

If you upon, creating a Spinal, account didn’t accept the terms and privacy policy, no error message was shown. This is now fixed.

New

Set a minimum and maximum characters length for all your string and text values.

When these are set, the value needs to match the criteria before the content can be published. Check the docs for more.

Improvement

Checked checkbox values would not get shown correctly in the editor. This is now fixed. ✅

New

Automatically set the filename based on your anchor Frontmatter. 🪄 You could already use datetime “directives” in the default value for both the filename and path frontmatter. So %y-%m-%d-new-content.md would create a filename like `2023-01-01-new-content.md` (assuming it’s the first day of 2023).

But now an extra “directive” is available: `%anchor-url-safe`. When included as the default value for the the filename, it gets inserted as the filename’s value and upon publishing the filename is created based on your anchor (which is often the content’s title). Example, content with an anchor/title of “My first title” and a filename value of `%anchor-url-safe.md` would be transformed to `my-first-title.md`.

Can also be combined with the datetime directives, so `%y-%m-%d-%anchor-url-safe.md` would then transform to `2023-01-01-my-first-title.md` (again: assuming today is the first day of 2023).

Works great with the “read only” toggle!

New

Previously default values were only available for filename and path, but they are now also available for all string and text input types.

New

Need to store images in your frontmatter in a different localtion, than the one for your content? You can now override where these need to be stored. Perfect for those organised people. 🧹

Improvement

List items would include an extra new line in the created markdown. Not anymore.

New

You can now set a slug in your Content Type’s settings. This will add a direct link to your published content on your website. Great way to easily check how things look live. 💡 Pro-tip: option/alt+click on the content from the overview will redirect you to the content too.

New

In your Content Type settings, you will now see the total content count.

Improvement

Added your first Content type before starting the (trial of) the Team plan, you noticed your content was limited to 25 items. Now, after starting the Team plan, all existing content will be auto-fetched for you. 🤖

Bugfix

For a brief moment, headings weren’t correctly added via the toolbar. This is now fixed.

New

If you’re feeling like going back to the basics, you can now switch to the Simple editor. This a basic Markdown editor for quickly fixing things or making sure the markdown is as expected. Or, of course, for hardcore markdown lovers.

Improvement

Various UI improvements to keep things looking sharp

Introducing an all-new dashboard! ✨

After a beta-test for a few weeks with a dozen customers (thanks so much for your feedback!), the all new dashboard is now available to all Team plan customers. 🙌

A calendar to view all scheduled and published content

The biggest change is a completely new feature: a calendar overview of all your scheduled and published content.

This new view (also available via the Global Command Menu; CMD/Ctrl+K) allows your team quickly see all the content if you have scheduled in the future and what content was published.

The previous two-column layout for the activities is now one, right next to the calendar. It shows the latest created content and comments. Want to see more activities within your account? Select View all or via the Global Command Menu (CMD/Ctrl+K) and type activities.

Read more in the blog.

New

Introducing snippets. Configure text snippets per Content Type. A great way to quickly insert often reused texts into your content. Add them in the editor by typing /.

Bugfix

Various smaller bugfixes throughout the app.

Improvement

UI improvements to keep things pretty and smooth. From pixel shifting on the sign up page to alignment issues in the editor and highlighting the current content’s status in the navigation.

Improvement

Along the smaller UI improvements: a slew of tweaks are made to make the app work better on smaller screens. Making it easier to quickly fix that typo before boarding a plane. 🛫

Improvement

A bigger UI improvement to highlight is how the action button in the top-right (Publish, Schedule) works. If you set a date, in your Content settings in the future, the action button will change from Publish to Schedule. If it’s in the past, it will be Publish (the default).

New

Improved the Content Type set up. Next to checking if the markdown source path is correct, it also checks and tells you how many markdown files are present. And finally you get notified if your GitHub organisation has disabled third-party access (so you can enable it to use Spinal).

New

Change the editor’s toolbar theme. Next to the default dark-themed, floating toolbar, you can now choose a fixed-at-the-top, light toolbar. Still lovely minimal. 🤍

Improvement

Two-way sync for existing content is here! When you open the editor, Spinal checks if the content has been changed outside of Spinal. If so, it updates it for you, so you can continue where you left off.

Improvement

Improved how images are inserted. Previously Spinal was pretty strict about leading and trailing slashes in the paths’ setup. This often resulted in errors on showing and uploading images in the editor. This is now improved.

New

Customise how dates are formatted inside the dashboard. Next to the default dd-mm-yyyy notation, you can now also choose mm-dd-yyyy (for all 🇺🇸) and yyyy-mm-dd (for all 🤓).

New

You can now exclude sub-folders when setting up a new Content Type. This was a often requested feature. Some Static Site Generators allow you to store markdown files in the root folder. This would subsequently then also import all markdown files in all folders. Not anymore.

New

If your anchor field (the heading of your content) is a string type (which is the case 95% of the time), you can now update it inline. This means no more getting into the Content Settings and change it, but update it right there. This is more inline with how most editors work.

Improvement

Some Static Site Generators allow to set no Frontmatter at the top. This would’ve previously skipped getting the content altogether. Now this content gets imported too.

New

Spinal automagically detects which frontmatter field to use to check if content needs to be published when it’s scheduled. But sometimes it guesses wrong. You can now override which frontmatter key needs to be used for scheduling. Check it in your Content Type’s settings.

Improvement

Various smaller UI improvements to keep things sharp. From the sign up page, to the editor and the onboarding screen.

Improvement

There are certain cases when Spinal cannot access your GitHub repositories. For example when your GitHub organisation has third-party access disabled. This is now reflected when setting up your first Content Type (instead of failing loudly).

New

Not feeling the default, floating toolbar in the editor? You can now toggle between a fixed-at-the-top and the floating toolbar. This is a per-member setting.

New

If you update content now outside of Spinal (for whatever reason, not recommended!). Spinal will now check if the content has changed, and if so, import the new content upon entering the editor.

Improvement

The paths (relative and absolute) for setting up images using your GitHub repository had quite specific requirements to make it work. Causing errors on showing and uploading images in the editor. This is now improved.

New

(North) Americans rejoice: you can now change the way the dates in your Spinal dashboard are formatted (for example in the activities log and on the content overview screen). By default it uses the mm-dd-yyyy format, but you now can also use dd-mm-yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd. Find the setting in your Profile settings.

New

Introducing an all-new Content Type settings layout. The settings were getting out of hand, and with more features to be released soon, it was time for some fresh paint.

With an easy to follow tab navigation at the top for: general settings, member management, image settings and frontmatter details.

Improvement

Various UI improvements to keep the UI fresh and sharp. Can you smell the fresh air already?

New

You can now easily add an alt attribute (also: image caption) to the images you upload. Find the “alt” button in the bottom-left of each image.

Improvement

New actions are added to the Global Command Menu: set up a new Content Type or go to Spinal’s homepage, docs or support.

New

Experimental support for TOML-frontmatter. It’s a work in progress. Do you use TOML? Let us know how it goes.

New

The Personal plan has now an increased content limit of 500 (was 200). Thanks for your feedback!

Bugfix

Creating an account would silently fail with passwords over 72 characters. It now gently asks you to decrease the number of characters.

New

When your content should be scheduled is determined by some “magic” by Spinal. But, if this doesn’t work as expected, you can now set a Default date frontmatter. This will take precedence over the applied magic.

New

Add a dash of colour! 🌈 You can now choose any colour for your Content Type. Gets your dashboard so more lively.

New

Introducing the Global Command Menu. Quickly navigate Spinal without leaving your keyboard. Summon it via CMD/Ctrl+K. Does your team use the Content Marketing Team plan? Then you can even use it to search through all your content!

Improvement

Upon setup connecting to GitHub is one step faster than before as you are now redirected straight to GitHub auth flow instead of Spinal’s Integrations screen.

Improvement

Various minor UI fixes to keep things smooth.

New

Introducing the new one-time payment for the Personal plan. Check out the pricing page for all the details.

Bugfix

When uploading an image to your frontmatter (either pasting or drag/drop) it would not insert the relative path (for GitHub-stored images). It now does.

New

When locking content, it adds a time-out period of 5 minutes before the content gets unlocked. If this is too long for you, you can unlock the content by selecting your avatar next to the content’s title.

Bugfix

When setting up another content type it would default to Bridgetown. We love Bridgetown, but don’t want to force it upon you.

Let’s get the new year started with some fresh updates and improvements. 🎆

Improvement

Various bigger and smaller UI improvements to keep things looking sharp. From the sign up page, the invite accept page to many other parts of the app.

New

Rotate your invite link. Create and remove your account’s unique invite link. Next to that you can set which role and what access new members get when they sign up with that link.

Bugfix

A datetime value in the custom columns could break things. But, right on time, this is now fixed.

Improvement

The set up modal, when you add your site for the first time, is now looking a fair bit sharper. All supported SSG options are now beautifully listed with their logo’s.

Improvement

When you publish content, and if something went wrong on GitHub’s side, you now get notified about this. Way better than silently failing in the background, isn’t?

Bugfix

Some times, stats for content would be calculated ánd show twice. That’s a bit too much calculation for my taste. If you happen to see double on the stats still—it is not you, do reach out.

New

Any string, select, datetime or boolean-like frontmatter value can now be filtered by. Select any of the visible columns to filter by that frontmatter. Remove the filter again by selecting the Remove filter button at the top.

Improvement

Previously, in some cases, your toggled columns could only been seen by team members with an administrator role. This is now fixed and all your team members can now see the enabled columns.

Bugfix

When you dropped (or pasted! 💡) images, that had spaces in the filename, in the editor, this would break the preview. Now filenames are properly encoded for you.

Improvement

Various smaller UI tweaks to keep things smooth and tidy.

New

Customise the order of your content. Spinal’s default order is by creation/published date. But maybe it makes more sense for your content type to be ordered by some other frontmatter key, like category or any other date-like frontmatter value. Now you can! Find the cog-icon in the content overview, select and choose the frontmatter key you want to order by.

Improvement

Content you type in editor are auto-saved for you. Previously you saw confirmation of this, with a bit intrusive banner-style in the bottom-right corner. Now a dot, left of the content’s page title, appears. Grey if there unsaved changes, and green if everything is savely stored in Spinal’s database.

Improvement

The paths to upload images to your local repository were previously sanitised. This caused trailing slashes to be removed, which are sometimes needed for certain static site generators to locate the image correctly. This is now improved.

New

Added support for three new SSG’s:

• Docusaurus
• Gridsome
• MkDocs

Getting a real solid list of supported static site generators now.

Improvement

When you added an image to be uploaded to your local GitHub repo and it already existed, the upload would fail without notice. No good! It now renames the file without fail. Good!

New

Introducing a whole new editor! You can now write and see a preview of your markdown at the same time. This kind of editor was really highly requested—so I’m super stoked to finally announce it.

Read all about it

Improvement

Less noticeable, but compounding UI tweaks were made throughout the app.

Bugfix

When you were typing away, while looking at the stats for your content, you would notice nothing changed. You had to close the info panel, and open it again. Not anymore. Stats gets updated while you type (and after the content is auto-saved).

New

Using the downright gorgeous MkDocs? You can now use Spinal to collaborate on your documentation.

New

See the latest content ánd comments right from your dashboard.

New

You can now directly push images to your GitHub repo. Set it up in your content type settings and drag and drop! Read the docs for more.

New

When previewing your content, your GitHub-stored images can now be seen too. Just set the correct paths in your content type’s settings.

Bugfix

Pagination would break in certain circumstances (caused by an upcoming feature). All your older content is now shown again as it should be.

Improvement

Renamed the path frontmatter to “folder”. Some got confused on its use due to this name.

Improvement

Various little UI- and copy tweaks to make things more clear (and less hidden).

Bugfix

Sometimes locked content would turn into an error on reloading the page. This is now fixed.

New

Next to the anchor column, you can now toggle up to five other frontmatter keys in your content overview. Really useful to get a bit more context for each content item, eg. the author or category. See the docs for more details.

New

Introducing support for some great new static site generators:

• Hexo
• Nuxt
• Zola
• VitePress

New

With many customers editing many different content types, the default icon in the sidebar didn’t help too much. You can now customise the icon in the content type’s settings. With many different icons to choose from, there’s for sure one that matches your content type.

New

Your content’s stats now have a first-class seat in the panel right next to your content. Toggle it by selecting the info icon.

New

You can now change the anchor column for your content. Previously Spinal defaulted to the title frontmatter, but you can choose any frontmatter now. Be gone: Untitled rows. 🙅‍♀️

Bugfix

The default anchor column now, next to title frontmatter, also supports Title.

Improvement

Along with some new icons, various little UI improvements are done to keep Spinal looking good. 💅

Improvement

The comments sidebar had some little UI tweaks, making them as smooth as the rest of the UI.

Improvement

Show off: you can now easily tweet your stats with the world. 🐦

New

You can now give access to some content types to your team members. The role (eg. Writer) given to that member applies to all content types they have access to.

When a new team member joins they will not have any access to any content type, until you explicitly give it to them.

You can update access on the content type’s settings page.

New

View all your marketing site’s content stats on your dashboard. See at a glance how many:

• characters
• words
• paragraphs, and:
• reading time…

… you and your team have written.

Improvement

Previously the content type’s settings screen would open in a modal overlaying the content overview screen. With some upcoming new settings being added soon, these settings now open inline instead. Making way for some cool new features.

New

Added VuePress as a new static site generator option.

New

It’s now possible to delete content and content types.

For content: select the dropdown in the top-right corner on the content edit screen and choose Delete. You can optionally also delete it from GitHub and thus from your site. For content types: go into the content type’s settings, and select Delete… in the bottom-left.

Bugfix

Previously frontmatter wasn’t correctly removed. Instead when deleting some frontmatter from the content’s sidebar, it would always remove the latest frontmatter in the list. This is now fixed.

Improvement

Your beautifully crafted code now gets nicely syntax highlighted on the preview screen.

New

Schedule content in the background. Successful content marketing teams now that a pipeline of content to be published is key. From your content edit screen, select the dropdown in the top-right and choose Schedule. This opens a modal to confirm you want to schedule your content. When confirmed, the scheduled content can be found from the sidebar under Scheduled.

The three preceding months after launch, many small and big features were pushed in quick succession.