CloudCannon’s 2024 wrapped

By David Large · 22 Dec 2024

It’s been another busy year — and looking back at the last twelve months of features, fixes, updates, and upgrades, it’s hard to believe we’ve come so far!

Here are just some of the key features we’ve launched this year to help you build and edit your static sites — and a sneak peek at what we’re working on for 2025.

CloudCannon remembers your changes without saving

Now you can refresh your browser, change your editing interface, and even switch who is editing your file — all without losing any content. CloudCannon will remember your changes, even if you haven’t clicked ‘Save’ to commit them to your repo or publish them to your live site.

We’ve also added more freedom and functionality to how you save your changes — you can select exactly which changes you want to save and commit, even while you’re still working on other pages.

Collaborative editing

Find where your team members are working, and edit your content together.

When someone else on your team opens the same file you’re working on, they’ll be able to watch your edits appear live on a read-only window — or they can take the editing reins and start writing or building pages themselves!

Live configuration editing and data reloading

When you update your data files, you'll see the changes right away. This means you can add new files and immediately use them in select inputs, or create new pages and link to them on the spot. It's all seamless and instant.

The same goes for your CloudCannon configuration file — any changes you make will appear immediately in the app. Whether you're tweaking your Collections, updating inputs, or modifying schemas, you'll see these changes reflected across your Site in real-time.

Unified Configuration and Headless Mode

We’ve reduced CloudCannon’s reliance on SSG-specific configuration. You’ll also see improved default configurations and fewer build restrictions for new sites.

With our new Headless Mode, you can choose to keep your site static, add server-side rendering (SSR), or create a fully hosted API. It’s your call!

Custom Permissions

Our new Custom Permissions feature for Team and Enterprise users offers much more flexibility in how you scope access — whether it's across your entire Organization or limited to specific projects, sites, groups, or base domains.

Among other tasks, you can control access to specific files or collections, or combine read and write permissions with publishing restrictions. We've also made it easy to duplicate and modify existing permission sets, saving you time when setting up similar access levels for different team members or projects.

With approximately ninety different permissions available, you can fine-tune access controls to match your organization's exact needs.

Faster branching

If you use branching workflows on CloudCannon Team or Enterprise plans, you'll have noticed that your sites are editable significantly faster than before, meaning your team can dive into content updates almost immediately.

We've made this possible by copying your most recent successful build from your parent branch before your new branch's build is even complete. While the actual time savings depend on your site's size, most users are seeing their full site branched and editable in under 30 seconds!

Quality of life features and fixes

Accessibility improvements

Along the way, we’ve improved app navigation using keyboard inputs, making it easier for users to navigate file context menus using the arrow, tab, and escape keys.

We’ve also added more ARIA labels and live regions to help users of screen readers.

The process by which CloudCannon uploads, moves, renames, and deletes files is now consistent with Git workflows. Selecting Upload, Move, Rename, or Delete now marks that file or folder for the corresponding action; that action will only occur the next time you commit your changes by pressing the ‘Save’ button.

We’ve also created more consistent actions and styling for the file context menu. This menu lets you match the actions you can take outside of the page (i.e. move, clone, rename, and delete an item).

Easily switch between editing interfaces

It now only takes a single click for users to switch between the Visual, Content, Source, and Data Editors.

Howdy, Partners!

2024 also saw the continued growth of our Partner Program, with many more agencies and freelancer developers joining this year.

We welcomed a host of new Partners to CloudCannon, and continue to celebrate the successes of those agencies and freelancers who have moved up to Silver and Gold status.

With our Community launching early next year we’ll look forward to further supporting Partners (and all CloudCannon users) with a platform and venue to share their work, help each other, and grow together.

2025: what lies ahead?

CloudCannon Community

I’m really looking forward to working more closely with all CloudCannon users, and I think our new community will be a great way to do that! It’s early days yet (we’re still finalizing several key details), but I’m excited to discuss how you design and develop for CloudCannon — and to learn more about how we can improve the platform for you.

Upcoming CMS features and continued improvements

On the engineering side of things, we've already identified a range of general features and improvements (among a great many others), which will be high priorities for the team in 2025:

Improved and simplified setup for Visual Editing
Input validation for fields in the Data Editor
Improvements to our existing publishing workflows, including content diffs
Richer file management options in DAMs
Accessibility improvements, including adding configurable keyboard shortcuts
Improvements in collaboration

We'll also focus on improving, restructuring, and refreshing our documentation, as well as including more video content to help our users achieve their goals.

Our roadmap and releases primarily come from feature requests made by our users — so if there's anything that would make Git-based content management easier for you, let us know!

We love working with Git — and with you

Thanks to all of you — editors, developers, designers, engineers, and content creators — for your feedback and support this year. We’re deeply invested in Git-based content management, and we love working on a platform that helps our users succeed.

And we’re looking forward to building more features to help you create the best sites on the web!