Spinal May update: validate before publishing and open by default

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And it’s May! 🐣 If you are in the northern hemisphere, hopefully Spring is around the corner. 🌷 At Spinal HQ there’s been some spring (code) cleaning planned. Time to slow down a little and switch gears to ship updates and new features at a steady, and comfortable pace. But rest assured there are some big new features in the making too! 🤫

With that said: let’s get to this month’s update. 👇

🔡 Set character length validations #

You can now set a minimum and maximum characters length for your frontmatter values. Talking to many of Spinal’s customers, this was often “hacked” through the field’s instructions text.

Once you set the minimum and maximum characters validations, you get, upon publishing, a message notifying you about the fields that do not meet the criteria. Also publishing isn’t possible until the validations are met. ✋

Works great with the “Instructions” text too!

🗃️ Auto-generate filenames #

With Spinal being a CMS for static site generators it has to add two fields (found in the Content Settings) for the path and filename. The filename proved to be a tricky one often. Specifically for less tech-savvy folks.

Now an extra “directive” (I really need to find another word for this 😅) is available: %anchor-url-safe. When included as the default value for the filename, it gets inserted as the filename’s value.

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 transformed title”, and a filename value of %anchor-url-safe.md, would transform to my-first-transformed-title.md.

🤲 Open by default #

Previously team members would only be able to see the Content Types and Content if they had been given access. Now all Content types and content are visible for everyone in the team. And only if they have access do they get the option to write or publish based on their role.

This is a fairly big change, but proved to needed to push collaboration one level up. Which is what Spinal is all about. 👭👬👫🧑‍🤝‍🧑

✨ Other noteworthy improvements #

Let’s go over some smaller, but still very noteworthy changes.

• add a default value for string and text input types
• set a different location for your Frontmatter image upload’s
• see the total number of content items in the Content Type settings
• there is now a bare, minimal markdown available next to Spinals’ WYSIWYG-editor
• team page is now only accessible to all (only admin’s can still create invite links and change roles)

That’s it for this month. As always happy to hear your thoughts and ideas.

—Eelco, founder Spinal