Announcement

Today we are officially launching our much requested affiliate program: Siteleaf VIP

We know a lot of our customers use Siteleaf with clients (and enjoy referring friends and colleagues), so we’re excited to say thanks and give back!

For every new user who signs up with your unique VIP link, you’ll earn a 30% commission for any paid sites they create. Depending on the plan chosen, you could earn over $1,000/year for a single referral — which recurs for as long as the site is active. For freelancers, this is a nice way to add a little recurring revenue to your income.

How it works

Sign up to create a unique referral link, and share this with your clients and colleagues. Feel free to add this link to your website footer and share it on social media. It looks something like this:

https://www.siteleaf.com/?via=yourname

You can link to any page on siteleaf.com by adding ?via=yourname to the end of the URL.

All you need to get started is a PayPal account, and you can keep track of your leads and conversions using the VIP dashboard at:
https://vip.siteleaf.com →

Thanks for using Siteleaf and continuing to spread the word!

Zapier connect’s the apps you use every day to automate your work, so you can concentrate on the bigger creative tasks. Zapier makes it possible for your emails to trigger a new task in your time management tool, or your social media output to be saved in your cloud storage system.

Before it was a struggle to get them all working in tandem. Now that Zapier has 1,000 integrations, you can choose your favorite tools and easily integrate them with Siteleaf.

Recently GitHub Pages upgraded to Jekyll 3.5.2, and we’ve now made it our default to match.

This update includes a few enhancements and bug fixes, most notably one which should dramatically speed up generation of your site! In testing jekyllrb.com, generation went from 18 seconds down to 8.

For a full list of revisions check out the release notes.

If you are still using Jekyll 3.4, here’s everything that’s new in 3.5 so far:

• Jekyll now uses Liquid 4, the latest! It comes with whitespace control, new filters concat and compact, loop performance improvements and many fixes.
• Themes can specify dependencies and Jekyll will require those. This makes it easier for theme writers to use plugins.
• The gems key in the _config.yml is now plugins. This is backwards-compatible, as Jekyll will gracefully upgrade gems to plugins if you use the former.
• Filters like sort now allow you to sort based on a subvalue, e.g. {% assign sorted = site.posts | sort: "image.alt_text" %}.
• You can now use tab-separated data files.
• Using layout: none will now produce a file with no layout. Equivalent to layout: null, with the exception that none is a truthy value and won’t be overwritten by front matter defaults.
• Dramatically faster site generation!
• Lots more bug fixes.

Hot on the heels of the Jekyll 3.3.1 update earlier this week, four additional plugins have been whitelisted for GitHub Pages.

These plugins are specifically geared toward software documentation and open source code projects on GitHub, but may come in handy for any type of website.

We have updated our default Jekyll version from 3.3.0 to 3.3.1, to match the recent update at GitHub Pages.

This update includes a few minor enhancements and bug fixes. For a full list of revisions check out the release notes.

Also included in this update are two new whitelisted plugins.

We’re happy to be included by GitHub in the official GitHub Integrations Directory.

Connect your website repo with Siteleaf and your Markdown content is editable in a friendly CMS designed with non-technical writers and clients in mind. Build sites using the tools you love, and make it easy to others to contribute without having to write code or understand Git.

Visit the Siteleaf integration and start using Siteleaf as a CMS for your Jekyll and GitHub Pages sites today.

Last week we released the brand new Siteleaf v2, which is built on Jekyll and comes with tons of new features like GitHub sync.

To help get everyone up to speed on v2, we’re excited to officially launch our new help site learn.siteleaf.com.

Learn about Developing Themes, Managing Content, using the API, how to migrate your Legacy Site, and more!

The help site itself is built on Siteleaf v2 (of course), and is open source on GitHub. We encourage your feedback and contributions.

Pro tip: You can even download a full copy of the repo (ZIP) for offline reference.

Happy learning!

Watch Introducing Siteleaf v2 on Vimeo

Nearly three years ago to the day, we launched the first public version of Siteleaf. We set out to create a new kind of content management system, one that marries the best parts of a static website generator (speed and simplicity) with a traditional CMS (power and collaboration). We dreamed of a tool that could be simple, without being dumbed down. One that values data portability, and is designed for a better web. As web developers ourselves, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Today marks a huge milestone towards this goal. We’re excited to announce Siteleaf v2 is now available, and with it comes compatibility with Jekyll, the most popular open source static site generator. Everything you already love about Siteleaf is still here (and much improved), but we’ve traded our proprietary templating system for one that’s powering over half a million websites by GitHub alone. We feel pretty good about that.

Those familiar with Siteleaf v1 will immediately feel at home with Jekyll. It’s the same HTML, Liquid, and Markdown goodness you already love, but with a bag of snazzy new tricks — including collections, nested metadata, custom permalinks, offline development, and more. Now, not only can you host your compiled site anywhere, you’re in control of your source data too.

In addition, Siteleaf v2 now syncs directly with GitHub so you can bring your existing Jekyll sites over in one click — and just as easily move your site out. Every edit you or other authors make in Siteleaf is synced to GitHub, including content and theme changes. See a log of edits, who made them, and revert back to any state with the Git tools you already use. It’s a time machine for your content.

We are seeking a talented Backend Developer to join our small, tight-knit team and contribute to the future of Siteleaf in a meaningful and rewarding way.

Siteleaf powers thousands of websites from independent blogs to Fortune 500 companies, with a passionate following among developers (we are a product for developers, made by developers). We just released an all-new Siteleaf v2, and have big ideas for the future. Right now is the perfect time to join our team, and help reimagine the future of static websites.

This post refers to a legacy version of Siteleaf.

For the last week publishing in the Siteleaf interface has been powered by our API. This has been a requested feature by some of our users and ourselves. Its behavior is bit different than some of our other API endpoints, so let’s go over it.

To initiate a publish, make an authenticated POST request to the /sites/:id/publish endpoint.

$ curl -u "$API_KEY:$API_SECRET" -X POST \
  https://api.siteleaf.com/v1/sites/$SITE_ID/publish

{"job_id":"e79af12c79ccd8866902d3dd"} 

This triggers a publish and immediately returns a job ID (or returns an already running job ID if one exists). You can stop here if you’d like and Siteleaf will happily chug away in the background.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. You can optionally check in on publish progress using your job_id from above by making an authenticated GET request to the new /jobs/:id endpoint.

This post refers to a legacy version of Siteleaf.

If you’re a heavy Siteleaf user, you might notice a few tweaks here and there that we recently introduced.

Improved page menu

The first thing you might notice is a redesigned page menu in the sidebar. After building large sites with Siteleaf, we realized the original design didn’t accommodate subpages and posts as well as it could. Now, it’s a lot easier to dive into and sort multiple levels of subpages while still keeping things looking clean.

Quickly search and browse posts

Another new thing we’ve introduced is the posts sidebar. Now you can dive straight into a page’s posts by clicking the posts icon next to the page link in the sidebar, or by clicking the “other posts” link on the post itself. From the posts sidebar you can now search and filter the posts list by title.

Siteleaf now supports publishing to SFTP!

Also known as Secure or SSH File Transfer Protocol, SFTP joins our extensive publishing options including FTP, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, GitHub Pages and our free Siteleaf Hosting.

This post refers to a legacy version of Siteleaf.

It’s time to celebrate, today is Siteleaf’s first birthday!

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:

• GitHub Pages integration: now you can publish your site with version control, see revisions and revert back to any publish state.
• New help site: we have a new site for theme documentation, tips, and FAQs (built on Siteleaf of course).
• User roles: control site access for your collaborators and clients.
• Asset metadata: add captions, alt text, and information to your images.
• Zapier integration: create new Siteleaf posts via e-mail or third party services.
• Siteleaf Gallery: see how others are using Siteleaf and get inspiration.

If you’re just joining us, we now have free Developer accounts available. You can sign up for free, try out our tutorials, and get a feel for the service before going live.

Follow @siteleaf on Twitter for more updates.

Exciting news! Starting today you can now publish your sites from Siteleaf to GitHub Pages.

GitHub Pages is a solid choice for static web hosting, especially if you already use GitHub to manage your theme code—and it’s clear a lot of our users already do.

Why GitHub Pages?

• It’s fast! Check out this comparison by Jeremy Morgan.
• It’s powered by a global CDN, from the folks at Fastly.
• It’s version controlled! Every publish is a commit, so you can see revisions and revert back to any publish state.
• And there’s no extra cost, GitHub Pages is included with your GitHub account.

Today we’re happy to introduce a highly requested feature: user roles. Since day one you’ve been able to invite collaborators to your site. With the introduction of user roles, you can now set the level of control each collaborator has over your site content. You can now set a collaborator’s role to one of the following:

Admin

The admin role gives full privileges to the collaborator, allowing them to manage and publish all content. This role is great for people who are helping build the site, like a developer or designer, since it allows them to upload theme files, change the site’s settings, and invite other collaborators.

Publisher

The publisher role is similar to the admin role, however publishers aren’t able to access theme files or the site’s settings. This is a great role to grant to a client. It allows a person to manage and publish pages, posts and assets, while protecting them from accidentally breaking the site’s theme.

Writer

The writer role is the most limited role available. A writer can only manage their own content, and any content they create will default to “Draft” status. This means that a Publisher or Admin must approve a writer’s content first before publishing it. This role is great for sites with many collaborators who only need access in order to add content (like a blog post).

This post refers to a legacy version of Siteleaf.

We’re constantly working on improving the Siteleaf experience and making it as flexible as possible. Today we’re happy to introduce two new features:

Asset metadata

Just like metadata on your Siteleaf posts, pages, and sites, asset metadata is a flexible way to add additional information to the assets uploaded to your site. This is perfect for things like captions, alt text, adding location info, and more. In your Siteleaf theme, you can access asset metadata through the asset’s meta variable. For example, if you had an asset meta field with a name of “caption”, you would access its value like so:

asset.meta.caption

For a more advanced example of how you could use asset metadata, check out our latest Siteleaf lab where we use asset metadata and a JS library to swap out images based on the window width.

Quick post edit

Another new feature we’ve added to the Siteleaf management area is the ability to quickly edit a post without leaving the list of posts. This is perfect if you just need to make a small change to a post’s title, toggle its visibility, or to reorder your posts by their publish date.

Today, we’re announcing developer accounts. At launch, we required a subscription in order to use Siteleaf, unless you were invited to a site. Now, you can sign up for free, test the waters, and get a feel for the service before subscribing. If you want to publish your site, simply upgrade to one of our plans and publish away.

This post refers to a legacy version of Siteleaf.

Approach — Managing content on sites can be a precarious task. We wanted to build a lean tool that would integrate easily into your workflow, yet provide everything necessary to maintain your content.

Goals — Siteleaf aims to strike a balance between control and simplicity. We believe content management systems should be simple but not overly simplified. That you own your content, your sites should be able to outlive their CMS, and you should be able to host sites anywhere you want. With these principles in mind we developed Siteleaf.

Features — Siteleaf is a lightweight platform for publishing websites. Write with markdown, collaborate with colleagues, develop with templates, build with our API.

If you can write HTML, you can create with Siteleaf.