CloudCannon

Since we opened up the Visual Editor API in August, we've seen it used for a translation connector, a drawing demo, and now something new: uploading multiple images at once to a component. Tom Richardson recently shared his "+ Add images" button, which takes a batch of images and fills the grid in live. The button only exists in the Visual Editor, so it never shows up on the published site. The GitHub repo is in the comments if you want to try it on your own site. It's just a single file to copy in.

"If I can have the whole site local and work on it in natural language, that's so much better than the database dependency and everything else that makes it a little bit harder." — Ryan Nielsen Everyday Media Group used to build client sites on WordPress. Every new site now ships on Astro and CloudCannon, so each one is just a folder of files the team can open locally and work through with Claude. Nobody's maintaining WordPress across the portfolio any more either, which frees the team up for new builds. Client projects that took six to eight weeks now take two to four! Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/euCHAmTE

Agencies always want to understand their clients better, and there's no better way to do that than to look at the CMS the way they'll see it — before you hand it over. I wrote about CloudCannon's new View As mode: pick a user, reload your Organization with their permission levels applied, and go poke around the pages and settings they'll actually use. https://lnkd.in/eCTDhmsb

Who's been saving time with the new dev server? 🙋♂️ Every CloudCannon developer knows the loop: change the config, commit, push, wait for the build, go and check it in CloudCannon. It's fine for one tweak, but less fine when a good editing experience takes thirty of them... The new dev server closes that loop! It runs CloudCannon's editing experience on your machine, against your local files, and updates the moment you save. No commits, no pushes, no builds.

A Site Dashboard README gives your team a single place to find helpful information without having to ask or leave CloudCannon 💡 We recently updated it so you can add images and anchor links, plus it now builds a table of contents for you. Find out how to add your own README here: https://lnkd.in/e47WpEP4

A few months ago, we moved off a well-known CMS and rebuilt our website with Claude. Our old process was SO SLOW. As a one-person marketing team, I'd design the page in Figma, go through rounds of review, build each element in the CMS, and test across various devices. I was designing the page once, and then recreating it in the CMS. A single page could take a few days from start to finish... I have a semi-technical background (with my first GitHub commit on 22 Jan 2017), so I thought there must be a better way. So we redesigned, rebuilt (Astro), and migrated (CloudCannon) the entire site in under 3 days. All with Claude Code (+ Cursor). 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗼 𝗻𝗼𝘄: 𝗦𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗱𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘆: adding a new page can take minutes. I open up Cursor, make a plan for what I'd like to include, tell it what components to use, send any inspo, and let the agent do the rest. We iterate on drafts until we have something ready to ship. 𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲: we have Notion agents in our marketing Slack channels. If someone spots a bug, they post it in the channel, the agent picks it up, makes the fix, and pushes the change. We also have agents to handle bigger requests (make a website proposal for company X) 𝗦𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁: logos that spin on page load, micro interactions across the site. All the small details that give a site that "wow" feeling are now so much easier. Before, you'd trudge through Stack Overflow, tweak JavaScript, and end up with something a bit janky. Now, it's a breeze. 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀-𝗳𝘂𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗳𝗳: Lighthouse scores, Ahrefs audits, A11Y are all important, but generally fall to the bottom of the list. We have agents who regularly read audits and implement any fixes. Currently 100 across the board on Lighthouse + Ahrefs. I will always have the final say on copy and design. I've only used Claude Design for animations - I like to keep the design of the website and let my 'taste' dictate the look- not an LLM... Has anyone else done something similar with their website? Keen to hear any learnings...

Our new dev server lets you work on your site locally and test CloudCannon’s editing experience in real time. Every save shows up in the browser immediately: Tom's latest video shows how it works, using an example Astro site 🚀

Tom Richardson walks through the new CloudCannon CLI in his latest video: adding a site, writing its configuration, and updating build settings. As a bonus demo, he also shares a script to automate site health checks — which client sites need updating, alerts for failed builds. (Before the CLI, that would have meant opening every site in the dashboard one at a time — now it's all accessible from the terminal 🚀)

CloudCannon has a CLI! We've aimed to put everything you might need in one place. Getting your configuration set up, validating it before a build runs, automating tasks, and even a local dev server to preview how CloudCannon will work against your local files. There's more in there too: a REST API, a TypeScript SDK, and the Visual Editor API that's quietly powered visual editing in CloudCannon for years, now documented and open to build on.