Editing terminology

An overview of the editing terminology in CloudCannon.

Unlike other JavaScript-powered SSGs, Astro has relatively strong opinions about organizing your site's content. This means that CloudCannon's editing concepts integrate naturally with Astro. CloudCannon organizes data using two main ideas:

  • Data — These are standalone data files. This is ideal for site configuration or files that don’t need to be repeated. Data is edited by altering a single file.
  • Collections — A collection is a single folder of files with a repeated format. For example, a collection might include pages, blogs, staff members, or recipes that share a format. Collections are edited by altering any file or adding more files.

In Astro terms, CloudCannon Collections correspond to Content Collections. Data files, on the other hand, correspond to standalone JSON files that are imported with JavaScript.

CloudCannon supports a set of file formats for files in Data or Collections:

  • Structured data files: JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, TSV
  • Markup files: HTML, Markdown, MDX
  • Combination files: HTML with front matter, Markdown with front matter, MDX with front matter

Front matter refers to a section at the top of a markup file that contains structured data. CloudCannon supports JSON, YAML, and TOML front matter. Markdown comes in many flavors, so be sure to check out configuring your Markdown engine.

If you need another supported format, get in touch with our support team, and we would be happy to look into it.

Open in a new tab