December update for Spinal. Christmas came early: a completely new editor

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How is it the last month of 2022 already? Did you get to do everything you wanted this year? Reach all your content marketing goals for your SaaS?

2022 was the year Spinal was introduced to the world. In March 2022 I started building it from the ground up. Possibly little, unknown tidbit: Spinal is built upon an internal tool I’ve used for years to quickly write and edit the static marketing content of my (previous) SaaS businesses.

And now about 9 months later, it’s way more advanced, and mány other SaaS companies use Spinal to craft money-making content for their SaaS marketing sites. No matter how many SaaS products you built, this is still an amazing feeling! 😊

Now on to some product updates. What’s new at Spinal?

📝 Introducing an all-new editor #

The first months of Spinal came with a quite basic editor that worked just well enough. But it quickly became clear that it couldn’t hold up too long. For one the markup toolbar was a bit buggy at times, which could be quite annoying. Secondly it was, technically, impossible to do some of the features that are on the roadmap.

So early November, after a few iterations and some amazing feedback from you, the new editor was launced. It’s still as minimal as before, but it now merges the preview screen with the editor. Making it a truly wysiwyg-editor.

Of course, the output to your static site’s repo is still fully markdown. Your less tech-savvy team members will love it (some already told me! 🥰).

Over the following weeks, various little bugs were squashed. And improvements to the editor are continuously being pushed.

Big thank-you to those who wrote in with bug reports for this new editor. Truly appreciated! 🙏

From the blog: check out these techinal SEO tips to improve your static site

💻 Support for three new Static Site Generators #

This month support for three new SSG’s was added:

⬆️⬇️ Order content by frontmatter key #

Spinal orders your content by default by its creation/published date. But sometimes this doesn’t make a lot of sense for that specific content type.

Take for example a documentation content type, with a frontmatter key, aptly named “order”. It makes more sense to order your content then by this key, as such the order matches exactly how it is on your static site too.

Simply find the cog-icon on the contents overview, select it and choose the frontmatter key you want to order by. If needed you can toggle the direction to be either ascending (going up) or descending (going down).

🌟 Documentation theme for Astro, built with Tailwind CSS #

The Spinal Dev Team just released v0.1.0 of the OSS documentation theme for Astro. After building ones for Bridgetown and 11ty, now Astro gets a beautiful theme for your docs.

See for yourself ↗️

👀 Roadmap sneak peek #

For your eyes only, a quick sneak peek into what’s coming to Spinal.

Group content by frontmatter #

In the same vein as custom order options for your content, grouping content will serve the same purpose: to allow your content to be visibly structured the same as your website. This will help your team navigate your content more easily.

That’s the goal with Spinal: help you and your team remove the struggles of creating and improving your static’s marketing site’s content more easily and quickly.

Command bar (with search) #

A command bar (or sometimes: command palette) is a way to quickly navigate any app without using the mouse. Power users, as Spinal customers are, often request this.

The command bar in Spinal will not just allow you to navigate through the app quickly, but also to search through your content. Super useful if you want to quickly make some edits to some content, but don’t want to:

click on Docs
scroll down to the pagination…
click page 3
no, it’s not there…
page 4 then?
no, it’s probably on page 5 then?
yes, there it is!

With this new command bar, just type a few characters, hit enter and you are ready to edit and publish! 💨

That’s it for this time around. This first year has been really good for Spinal and I can’t wait to show you all that’s in store for 2023 (beyond the sneak peeks I previewed in this email 😎).

If you are celebrating: enjoy Christmas and New Years and hope to speak to you again early January. 🎄🎇

—Eelco, founder Spinal

twitter.com/spinalcms ↗️