Spinal April March update: a calendar, activities and email notifications 🤯

Hey there!

Not interested in receiving the monthly Spinal updates anymore? Unsubscribe here. ✌️

Welcome to another edition of Spinal’s monthly newsletter (including 17 emojis). It’s April, so 25% of the year is gone. 🫣 Are you on track for your (content) marketing goals?

What’s new at Spinal #

Let’s dive into what launched at Spinal in March. Something big I’ve had on my list before I even launched Spinal finally launched:

💨 New dashboard #

A completely new dashboard! And it’s not just a nice new layout and colours, but three distinct new features. 🤯

These three new features are:

calendar
improved activities
email notifications

📆 Calendar

The calendar has been on my wish list before I event launched Spinal. When talking to customers, the sentiment was very much the same: “that would be so, so helpful!”.

The calendar shows all published and scheduled content in a beautiful calendar. Great to see what’s coming up and prepare other marketing material for it.

The current month is always visible on your dashboard, but you can go to the dedicated calendar screen via the Global Command Menu (CMD/Ctrl+K) as well. There you can traverse between months.

🪵 Improved activities

The activities are not strictly new, but rather a continuation of a mediocre implementation. Previously you saw two columns: new content and new comments. These two columns are now consolidated into one column.

And besides some nice veneer, you can visit the activity screen (again via the Global Command Menu) that shows all activity happening in your account.

🛎️ Email notifications

Well, not plural as currently only notifications for new comments is supported (the most requested since Spinal launched 😅).

But it’s the most important one to improve collaboration on your marketing content within Spinal. Whenever someone comments on your content (ie. content you created), you get a swift email where you can jump right into the conversation.

But there was quite a bit more that launched this month. 👇

🤧 Snippets #

Snippets allow you to insert small bits of predefined texts into your content. You can summon the snippets from the rich-text editor by typing /. All the snippets available in that Content Type will show up. From there simply insert. The / will be omitted once you insert a snippet.

Snippets can be added per Content Type.

If you need some really specific text, or something that are needed often, snippets are the way to go.

In this blog you can see an example how we use snippets to build our changelog.

🦄 Unified the editor’s action button #

If you previously wanted to schedule content to be auto-published for you, you had to go into the dropdown menu of the action button and select “Schedule…”.

Now whenever Spinal detects you want to schedule later—because you have your Content Setting’s date in the future—the action button changes from “Publish…” to “Schedule…”.

Saving you a click. 🏁

Spinal has had a floating toolbar since its launch. You can summon it by selecting some text, much like how Medium works too.

Now there’s a new toolbar theme that you can set as the default. It’s still beautifully-minimal and will stay fixed at the top.

Did you know you can still use all the markdown you are familiar with in the rich-text editor? Read about it and for more tricks and tips in the editor, do check out the docs.

For all the latest product news and updates, don’t forget to check out the changelog.

From the blog 👓 #

SaaS Writer Hub; looking for a freelance SaaS writer? This is a side-project I’m working on at Spinal. Helping founders like you connect with the best freelance SaaS writers around the world.
Is Spinal a good fit for us?; I get this question often (as I’m the only one on support), so I answered this question in this blog.
How to create a headway-like changelog in a SSG; no need for yet another tool, just your SSG of choice and Spinal (of course!). And if you are looking for some inspiration to start your own changelog, check out this blog.

📣 What’s coming to Spinal? #

Spinal is constantly improving. The roadmap is super clear, but changes every so often thanks to your input. So feel free to send those suggestions! One of those upcoming changes is because of the chats I’ve had with a few of you:

New access flows and visibility #

A big impact change is coming that I’ve been talking about with a dozen customers: changing visibility and access of Content Types and its content. And it has become clear the current set up needs to change.

Spinal is meant to work together with your team on all your static site’s content. Not being able to see some Content types or when some content is scheduled is limiting teams to do just that.

How it currently works:

members can only see the content types they have access for
they can only see the content from those Content types (and based on their role write and/or publish)
this visibility applies to all activity, calendar and notifications as well

How it will work starting this month

all team members see all content types
all team members can view all content, but…
…only those with access can write and/or publish (based on their role; no changes here)

This change simplifies things quite a bit for most teams. Having all content visible by default helps teams better in organisation and structuring.

If you have any question about this change, please reply and I’ll personally answer.

That’s it for this month. I know I’m a broken record, but things are getting more excited every day! 😅 🎢

—Eelco, founder Spinal