Coming soon: Live config editing and data reloading

I’m really excited to (pre)announce a range of upcoming features that will make CloudCannon more powerful, flexible, and user-friendly — for everyone from single Site owners to Enterprise users with complex publishing workflows and partner agency developers making client websites.

Our current Private Beta, open now for CloudCannon Partners and Enterprise users, will bring a range of upgrades:

Live data reloading and configuration editing

We’ve heard from our users that waiting for builds can take too much time, and we agree! Now when you update your Site data and configuration, you’ll be able to see your changes instantly in the CMS without saving and building.

• Changes to your data files will be applied before you save them, meaning you can:
  • Add files and link to them from a select input
  • Link to newly created pages immediately
• Changes to your CloudCannon configuration file will be instantly reflected in the app. For example, you’ll be able to:
  • Add, remove, change, and view your Collections immediately
  • Update your inputs, structures, and schemas, and see those changes across your Site

New Headless Mode

With our new Headless Mode, we’ve streamlined CloudCannon's interface for your Sites that build and host externally, whether they're static or not. You’ll still be free to create exactly what you or your clients need — fully hosted static websites with visual editing, server-side rendering (SSR) or other server-side functions, or fully hosted APIs — while still offering CloudCannon’s top-tier editing experience. You can switch to Headless mode to disable hosting and builds if you don’t need them.

(We believe that most content websites should be static — for efficiency in page speed, reduced compute time, and more efficient use of server resources. But we also believe that developers should have as much freedom as possible: some projects might call for 100% static content, while others may more closely resemble web apps with custom authentication and user personalization.)

Unifying configuration across SSGs

We’re also simplifying the editing configuration process. We're removing SSG-specific config from the CloudCannon configuration file, which means users creating new websites will be able to edit their content even faster, and benefit from smarter default configuration options.

Streamlined build process

By removing SSG-specific configuration we’ll no longer need to communicate with the static site generator during the build process. This will mean faster builds, fewer integration issues and will make building on CloudCannon more similar to your local environment. All CloudCannon will need to know is how to install your dependencies, run your build, and the name of the output directory containing your static site. Your build can still be used to supplement the CloudCannon editing interface but it’s no longer a hard requirement — and users will have the best of both worlds.

All existing sites on CloudCannon will continue to use the existing build options in your configuration. If you’d like to try the new build process, follow our migration guide to upgrade to the Unified Configuration.

What this means for you

If you’re an existing user with your sites already set up, your current configuration and workflows will remain unaffected. When you're ready to explore these new features you can opt in and configure them at a site-by-site level, but you won’t have to upgrade to our Unified Configuration if you’d prefer not to. CloudCannon Partner or Enterprise users can opt in to the Beta to test these features early.

Live data reloading and configuration editing can be enabled on existing sites with no migration or configuration needed.

If you’re building new sites on CloudCannon, our new features, options and workflows will give you additional flexibility, efficiency, and control.

Our timeline

We’re still testing and working hard behind the scenes, and we’re looking forward to receiving more feedback from our Partners and Enterprise users.

Depending on the feedback we receive from the Private Beta period, we plan to release these major changes to all CloudCannon users in the coming weeks.