Dev Diary 90 - The CMS update you've all been waiting for!

:tada: It’s here… it’s finally here! :tada:

The CMS update so many of you have been asking (and patiently waiting) for has officially landed, and it’s a big one!

I know it’s been a little while since the last CMS update, but trust me, this special Dev Diary was worth the wait. We’ve packed in a ton of exciting progress and features you’re going to love.

:rocket: Watch the video below and let us know what you think — we can’t wait to hear your thoughts! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I know what you’re going to say: “That’s great, but when can we use it?” :sweat_smile:

Believe me, we’re just as eager to get it in your hands! We’ve been saying this for a few weeks now, but we really are working as fast as we can. We just need to make sure the CMS is rock solid before it ships in the app. Thanks so much for your patience :raising_hands:

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Can’t wait to get my hands on it. I personally would be fine with the editore/elements part, e.g. the MD file rendering, as this is already is a very handy feature and would help a lot.

The front-end part, aka Live CMS, could be shipped separately.

Win-Win for everyone :wink:

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Fantastic! This is going to be so handy and is something I’m eagerly waiting for as it will allow me to add the last missing item from one of my sites.

I hope we don’t have to much longer to wait to start testing this and building out some awesome blogs. Although speaking for myself I see lots of other use cases other than a blog.

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@ben That is looking really good! :grinning_face:

With the pagination, how do you handle the situation where there are lots of pages?

I was doing something like this (paging the the pagination list):

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I would be more than happy to try it out in its current state (as a beta), even if it does change, just to get my head around how it works. :wink:

Silly question: is it possible to have PDF or other linked file in posts?

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the good news is: the elements CMS is ready.

the bad news is: it’s Friday! and we know that we don’t see a launch on Friday :frowning:

edit…

btw: it is really nice stuff!

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Is it just me, or does everyone want to see Ben do a cooking show?

I dunno…. he just has that cooking show vibe…

And here we just add a sniff of black cardamom, and you’ll see that this will bring it to life. I’ve also premixed this collection of herbs, which I simply drag and drop into the bowl, like this, and then when you add water…. it’s delicious. All very simple!

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Hey @ben

I really like this :+1:

Some rough edges here and there but I’m sure that will be polished over time.

I really can’t wait to try it for myself.

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@ben

Is it possible to get the same CMS resource selection for the text component and the typography component as for the image component?


If that possible, I could think of many useful scenarios that I would use.

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Hi Ben, not quite the update I was looking for. After seeing the email at about 4 am this morning, I thought today is going to be a great day with a new toy to play with. :grinning_face:

Things are looking quite nice and I can’t wait to put it into action. Keep up the good work!!!

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I’m quite impressed by what you’ve done. I see one or two use cases for my website: a personal news section as well as a list of blog post highlights. I can’t wait to get it running on my machine! I’m still wondering how such a website can be deployed and running as a static website, without any backend components required..

Very good - you have really done an amazing amount of work - congratulations

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Ok it has to stop now - PLEASE just stop showing us what you have done but can’t get hands on! It’s just not cricket! :slight_smile:
Well done it’s looking good but just let us have it to play with! :waving_hand:

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This looks very, very impressive. The designs are really attractive and I’m sure once we get to try them out the learning curve will be fairly short.

Just as an aside when doing these demo videos, could you also demonstrate the responsive layouts. Pretty much everything we see in videos now is focussed on desktop layouts which is a little strange for a ‘mobile first’ product. I’d love to have seen how the CMS layout responds on a mobile device.

We will handle this by showing a subset of pages.

However, you can build a custom pagination component as the CMS Collection gives you access to the pagination data. I believe I covered this in one of my previous CMS preview videos :slight_smile:

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yes, you can link to anything from within your Markdown files.

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This is already possible.

First place a Text or Typography component inside a CMS Item component. Then you have access to all of the Item’s data, so you can type in {{item.description}} directly in the text editing area — this is how I’m doing all of the text content in my video.

Elements CMS will require the backend for the foreseeable future. We are not generating unique pages for each item in collections of data. We did actually discuss this approach, but decided against it as we felt the solution we went with would provide more flexibility for both ourselves and our users :slight_smile:

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Totally get where you’re coming from, and yes, all of the projects and templates we ship are fully responsive!

This particular video was focused on showing how the CMS works, rather than highlighting the design itself. I kept it intentionally minimal so the demo could stay short, clear, and to the point.

That said, as we get closer to launch, we’ll be sharing more videos showcasing the CMS templates in action, including how they look across all device sizes. Can’t wait to show more soon! :blush:

I’m working on a site for my brother that will have three main sections: videos, photo galleries, articles. Videos are few and far between so I can keep that section updated myself. The other two sections are where I need CMS with (eventual) updating via browser. So my questions are:

Can CMS have a collection of photo galleries?

His articles will probably work as blog posts, but they currently have photos embedded throughout the text. Is this an option?