We are seeking a talented Backend Developer, our first ever full-time Siteleaf hire. This is a super rare opportunity 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 are currently working on 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.
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 \
http://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 endpoint, unlike our others, consistently returns Server Sent Events (SSE) instead of JSON documents (including errors). The data field is JSON encoded however. SSE is supported in all modern browsers and there are client libraries in a number of programming languages.
Additionally, job ID’s are kept for at least 30 minutes after completion so you can check in on a publish immediately or wait a bit.
Can’t wait to see what uses you come up with!
Publishing from the gem
First install the latest gem (0.9.23 as of writing)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every publish from Siteleaf shows as a commit on GitHub.com
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).
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.
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.
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.
