November update from Spinal

Hey there!

This is the monthly newsletter from Spinal (a beautiful and minimal CMS for static site generators). Welcome to November! 👋

What can you find in this month’s newsletter?

• What’s new in Spinal (spoiler alert: a lot! 😅)
• The short journey of Spinal’s pricing model
• A sneak peak into some upcoming features (for your eyes only 🤫)

It’s a big one, so let’s get straight into it.

What’s new in Spinal #

Some great new, and highly requested features were recently released. Among some UI tweaks these features got the most praise (note that most of these features are for the “Content Marketing Team” plan only).

💬 View latest content and comments #

If you have multiple content types set up, it was previously annoying to check all seperate content types for new content created by your team. Not anymore! All latest content is now visible right from your dashboard. Also the latest comments added by your team is visible as a column too. Jump right into the discussion on any piece of content from your dashboard.

🙈 Toggle frontmatter visibility #

Previously Spinal would only show one column (the anchor, eg. title) on your contents overview. This is enough for most set ups. But often it would be useful to see a bit more, for example the category or the author of the content. Now you can! Select the cog-icon on the top-right and choose any of the frontmatter keys to make it visible in the overview. Currently this is limited to “string” values only.

🖼 Push images straight to GitHub #

From very early on Spinal had support for uploading images to Cloudinary. It’s a pretty great tool to store images as it lets your easily transform images (think resizing). But many simply like to store images in their GitHub repo where their SSG of choice picks them up and inserts them directly or the build process transforms them.

You can now drag and drop (or paste!) images into the editor and they are commited straight to your GitHub repo and inserted with the correct markdown (ie. !\[Alt text\](path-to.jpg)—without the backslash). Head over to the docs to see how to set this up.

🐵 Markdown preview now supports local images #

Based on the work of the previous new feature, you can now also preview your GitHub-stored images in the markdown preview. If you entered the fields in the content type settings, it should just work. Check out the docs for more.

🚧 Docs are WIP #

You’ve seen a few links to the documentation. This too has been highly requested (and helps me lessen time for support 🙂). View them here.

If you want to see all updates that are (and will be) released, check out the changelog.

🤑 The short journey of Spinal’s pricing model #

Tuesday I changed the pricing for Spinal. I wrote about the short journey (so far) about the pricing changes since launch. There have been quite some changes since, but I think I finally got it worked out pretty well. Read about it here. Some “open-talk”: the day before the price increase new customers were in the double digits. 🤫

As always: love to hear your thoughts.

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Btw. have you seen this article over at the Canny blog? I think it’s a pretty good primer on SEO for your SaaS website.

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Upcoming features #

I’d like to give a little sneak peek into what’s being worked on currently. This will be exclusive to newsletter subscribers (at least until it will be live)! 😇

✍️ New and improved editor #

Right off the bat: possibly the biggest change since Spinal launched. The editor in Spinal worked okay most of the time, but needed a manual at times. To fix the latter “requirement”, work on a new editor started some time ago. It has seen a lot of iterations and I’ve gathered some really useful feedback from some of you already.

But wait: that looks exactly the same?! Yes and correct. For now the new editor will have the same features, but improved and be more stable. But I’m excited about the new possibilites the editor will provide in the future: some really cool new features based on the new editor, that I’m sure you will love.

⚖️ Custom order options #

Ever seen your content overview, but the ordering was off? At least: it doesn’t match what is on your site? I have. This was most obvious when I started to create the documentation for Spinal in Spinal.

Every content item, within Spinal’s documentation sections, has an “order” key. This is how docs are ordered on the docs site. But Spinal orders them, by default, by creation date. This is the correct way for most content types, but—as is often—not all the time. So soon, you can change the ordering of your content however makes sense for your content type.

That’s it for this month. You made it! 💪

October was the best month in terms of sign ups, site visitors and new customers! From some of the chats I had with new customers, this is due to some of your recommendations. So: thank you! 🙏

See you in December! 🎄

—Eelco, founder Spinal

Ps. since Tuesday, Spinal is open for all! No more wait list in place. 👉 spinalcms.com/signup. 👀

Ps 2. I’ll be (virtually) attending Jamstack conf

Ps. 3. Also (virtually) attending BridgetownConf 2022