Be careful…
Completely ruined my CMS
Had to delete file…
Duplicate existing .md file - re do it change all…
Then CMS started working again…
Are you certain it was Typora? What makes you say that? Circumstances or did you trace it to something in particular? Markdown is just simple text. It makes me wonder if something else happened?
Updated Typora this morning
Made a markdown file - posted -broke CMS
Removed latest markdown file - things started working…
Yep 
- Typora is the only thing that changed…
What I was getting at is what did Typora get wrong? It only makes a text file. Markdown, especially the basic md that Elements CMS uses has very few options to get wrong. It should be easy to find.
Michael,
Diff the two markdown files in a terminal window, or if you’re not comfortable using the command line try FileMerge which is part of Xcode (if installed it will be in Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/FileMerge.app - you can open it directly from there and drag’n’drop the two files to see what’s changed).
Don’t have Xcode - not to familiar with terminal
Have no idea what Typora corrupted the CMS
All posts died - nothing in preview - nothing online - just empty…
To my knowledge, the latest version of Typora only changed PDF file support.
this is more than likely and issue in the frontmatter. All you have to do is have one markdown file with a front matter issue and it breaks the CMS. I would check for curly quotation marks especially. There may be a setting in Typora where you can set the default to the straight ones.
Or, as for me, an error in the date…
Was this an error injected by Typora?
I’m not trying to kick a horse here. I am trying to decide on BBEdit or Typora for my text editing.
Not a all… it was MY error !
Typora automatically converts straight quotes to curly “smart quotes” as you type, provided the feature is enabled in your settings. This applies globally or on rendering, depending on how you configure your preferences.[1]
Typora Settings:
Worth checking?
Also, I don’t normally use Typora. So I tried a test file and structured it the same way my other posts were. The ftp’d it to the server. It broke the CMS. So, I opened the file with One Markdown and discovered that there was an extra set of — in the frontmatter area. Typora automatically inserts the closing one, so be careful not to add it.
Also, Typora likes to capitalize the first letter of the fields in the frontmatter. I am sure there must be away to turn that off.
No frontmatter - still do things the original way…
Write in Typora save as .md
Drag into elements
Copy frontmatter from previous post - paste into new one - change and edit date, post number, etc
Okay, I deleted the Typora file I had ftp uploaded. Drop it into Elements and Published and it works fine. There must be something in the frontmatter. Can you copy and paste your frontmatter here>
Maybe elements is converting the titlecase front matter keys to lowercase, which is why it works via elements?
I don’t think Typora has an option to make it lowercase
@ben, maybe Elements should convert the keys to lowercase when reading the front matter keys (if that is the issue).
this post was the actual crash - the front matter was copied from the apple post after crash:
---
title: "The World’s First Trillionaire Is Here — And You Should Be Absolutely Furious"
author: "Michael Droste"
publisher: "Windy Town WindyTown.com"
number: 34
date: "2026-06-14"
status: "published"
tags: ["musk, ai"]
categories: ["musk, ai"]
image:
src: "images/0000034musk.png"
alt: "Musk Photo"
seo-title: "The World’s First Trillionaire Is Here — And You Should Be Absolutely Furious"
seo-description: "It happened. Or it’s about to. Depending on when you’re reading this, the ink is either drying or already dry on the most obscene financial milestone in human history. Elon Musk — the guy who runs four companies simultaneously while posting memes at 2 a.m. — is either already the world’s first trillionaire, or he’s close enough that the headline is inevitable."
---
On your tags and categories, do you have one or two tags. I think I would get rid of the quotes in the tags and categories.
I just created a new post through the online cms, this is how it handled frontmatter:
title: Test Title
date: 2026-06-15
author: pastor
tags: [Right Division, Hebrews]
featured: true
status: published
excerpt: This is the excerpt
image:
src: “https://followingpaul.org/resources/md_images/the-will-of-god-for-the-body-of-christ.webp”
alt: This is the alt field.
This is the body.