Editing terminology

An overview of the editing terminology in CloudCannon.

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How strict is your SSG about organizing your site’s content?

Some SSGs, like Jekyll, Hugo, Astro, and Eleventy, have strong opinions about how to organize the content in your repository. CloudCannon can run automatic processes on these SSGs and provide basic editing out-of-the-box. Other SSGs take a less opinionated approach, allowing you to decide where and how content is stored.

SSGs with strict organizational structure naturally integrate with CloudCannon’s editing concepts. For less strict SSGs, you will need to configure CloudCannon to match your content structure. We will configure other editors later in this guide.

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.

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.

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