We’ve been busy — and this week’s CMS update brings three powerful new features: Search, Import, and Open Graph tag support!
We’re especially excited about bringing search to the Elements CMS — it’s fast, flexible, and built right in. Make sure you watch the video to see it in action
While we’re moving quickly, the CMS isn’t quite ready to ship in Elements just yet. These early previews are your chance to follow along and help shape its development.
With version 1.0 just around the corner, the price of Elements will increase starting June 1st. If you’ve been thinking about building your site with Elements, now’s a great time to jump in.
Visit elementsapp.io to grab your license and lock in the current pricing!
Thanks for Your Feedback
These features came directly from your suggestions — so as always, we’d love to hear what you think so far. Your feedback truly makes all the difference
I build sites for clients. Will there be additional per client charges to use the CMS? Will I be able to build Admin pages that the clients can use to update their own sites? If so can these be password protected? Will the CMS be able to support .webp images with different sizes for different device sizes?
@ben This is starting to get really exciting I hope the launch isn’t too far away because the blog is the only thing I need now to be able to publish my new website
The core CMS components will be included as part of the app — there is no per-client cost for the in-app CMS components, you can use them on as many sites as you like.
Just a quick reminder — if you’re building and selling sites to clients, you’ll need to be on the Pro plan.
Yes — we do plan to release a set of admin components to enable this functionality. While the initial focus is on getting the core CMS components into the app, online editing and a password-protected admin area are absolutely on the roadmap.
To be completely transparent: the online editing components will come with an additional cost. These are quite complex to build and maintain, and the added cost helps ensure we can properly support them long term.
That said, the CMS itself is 100% open. You (or another developer) can interact directly with the Markdown files behind the scenes. So there’s no lock-in — you can use your own editing interface or workflows if you prefer.
Yes — the system we’ve built is capable of supporting that. It will require some additional work on the frontend components to ensure everything behaves responsively and loads correctly, but it’s definitely possible.
This looks like it’s shaping up nicely. As someone who is only starting the “blog” route is it possible to have a template for markdown “posts” that I could start work on now? Whilst I appreciate it may change for final version at least I will be ahead of myself before we get there. TIA
this is really very good work that you are doing with this CMS. what we can see in the developer diaries is really impressive and is going in the right direction …
specific feedback on missing or improvable points - I can probably only give this once you have worked with it.
As before: great job. This is shaping up to be everything I need for a variety of functions on my sites. Indeed, as someone else mentioned, CMS is now the gating element to my using Elements in production, as I’ve satisfied myself by playing that the rest of the components work as I need them to.
However, while watching today’s update, I did come up with a question. Let’s say I have that set of blog articles as you demonstrated today. How do I design a component so that it only shows articles published after {{date}}? Or before {{date}} for that matter? (I suspect you’re going to Twig something at me, so maybe I should go over there and start studying.)
I believe the key feature for Elements will be its Content Management System (CMS). If they can refine the CMS to empower our clients to manage everything online through admin access, Elements will truly dominate the market.
With the “import” of Alloy posts, can they reside in a separate folder on the server and therefore be maintained by a separate online editor. I would like to use an external editor to edit / duplicate / add / delete markdown posts.
I am probably misunderstanding, but it seemed in the video you were dragging those posts into Elements. So I am not sure how would maintain the individual posts externally?
Most likely it will be in the same, or very similar, format to what I’ve been using in the videos — no promises though, it could change.
This feature is built in to the Collections component — you can filter the collection by date, status, tags, author, featured status. We will likely add more flexibility to this as we get closer to launch
The online editing components will come with an additional cost.
Adding/Editing markdown files within Elements will come as part of the app.
Hope that answers your question!
Right now you cannot link the CMS Collection component to a “remote” folder — so you would need to import your alloy posts folder in to Elements and link that to the Collection component.
I’m not familiar with how Alloy worked, but if you’re able to you should point/install the Alloy editor to your newly imported posts folder in Elements — if that makes sense?
As I mentioned above, the CMS is completely open to all users and developers to use any editing tools they want to — we will even have an API available for you to fetch / display data in within your own components.
It seems like a script could be written that simply searches for Alloy’s tags and edits them to Element’s tags.
The addition of adding the collection for all Alloy posts is brilliant. It seems we can take advantage of this feature and apply a filter. In my mind this would convert Alloy posts over for legacy sake but then allow for all future posts to be made in the native Elements/Twig format.
Maybe I don’t know how complicated this “simple” change is…
My “external editor” already checks for an alloy post and converts it to my current own new format (as you suggest). I will modify it so that it now converts it to the new Elements format which is what I will now use going forward. I will wait for the CMS to be made available before committing too much time to this, as it could still be in a state of flux.
Yes, I agree that going forward, the markdown created by an external editor should be in “native” Elements format (with maybe customised markdown metadata if required).
@Ben thanks for response so the question should have been phrased do you have a template I can use please, I understand it might not be 100% for final version but at least its a start.
THANKS
Thanks for Your Feedback
I hope the launch isn’t too far away because the blog is the only thing I need now to be able to publish my new website 
