Alloy v3 Preview: Embedding content in Alloy v3 is as easy as drag-and-drop

This is the first day of our preview series looking at the upcoming Alloy v3 release. You can check out the subsequent days of previews by going to this thread, which links to all of the currently released previews:

DAY ONE:

For our first day of previews let’s dive right into things with Alloy’s brand new Embeds tool! While Alloy’s mainstay has long been blogging, we’ve now incorporated an easy-to-use set of tools to allow you to embed content within your RapidWeaver projects. That embedded content can then be edited directly from your website using the same Alloy Editor you use for creating and editing your Blog Posts.

Much like with our Blog Posts in the Editor we get a nice list view showing each of the Embeds we’ve created. This list shows the title for each Embed, along with a series of buttons for Editing, Embedding and Deleting them. Our Embeds are sorted into sections that we call Pages to help you organize your content better. Let’s take a quick look at the Embeds list view:

Creating and editing our Embeds is really easy. The Embed’s content is straight forward Markdown content that can contain everything that our Blog Posts are capable of – formatted text, headers, photos, tables, links, and more! Here’s a look at our Embed editing view:

While the buttons for Editing and Deleting our Embeds is pretty self explanatory, the Embedding button in the column labeled “Stack” is something quite unique. This small purple button might be unassuming, but in reality it is going to automatically build out a stack for us when we drag it from our Editor into our Stacks page in RapidWeaver. Dragging this small purple icon into our project file on our Stacks page builds a stack that creates a link to our embedded content.

Alloy’s Embeds, while really simple to setup and use, are actually quite powerful. After their initial setup and embedding into your project you can then edit that content straight from your site without the need to republish your page, allowing you to make quick changes to content on the fly.

Tutorial Walk-thru

Let’s take a look at the tutorial video for Embed Content Management to see all of this in action. It’s far more fun than just listening to me describe it, after all. In this video we look at modifying existing Embeds and creating one from scratch, as well as how we go about the simple drag-and-drop process of inserting our Embed into our RapidWeaver project file.

We think that Alloy’s new Embeds will help make managing your site’s contents so much easier and improve your daily workflow.

Coming Up

In our Day 2 post we’ll be looking at another form of Content Management new to Alloy called Droplets. So stay tuned and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

BONUS: Quick Start

As a bonus for today I’m including a look at our new Quick Start video for setting up your Editor and Credentials. I’m including this mainly for users that are new to Alloy as not much has changed, but it is a great review for any existing users as well. Especially since Alloy v3 will now also include the ability to have a Secondary Login option:

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Looks awesome!

Presumably, updating from v2 will be seamless, and will just pick up existing credentials, blog posts, etc?

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Definitely. This is already slated to be covered on Day 5. :wink:

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Blog posts are just files, so it is a upgrade in place, so to speak. This is a very nice update and I am sure all will be pleased to see whats coming in the following days.

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I notices the images you replaced here have no rounded corners. Do the images you add with Alloy follow the settings in the control panel about rounding?

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When you drag-and-drop the Embed into your project file it creates a specialized stack for that Embed. Each individual Embed stack has its own settings:

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Hi @elixirgraphics , I’ve not had a chance to familiarise with everything in Alloy 3 yet, but could this be something that I integrate into my websites that will allow my clients to edit parts of the website themselves ? in other words a content management system for Foundry ? Kind Regards | Justin

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No worries! Today is the first day anything has been revealed.

Yes, that is very the purpose of Embeds. If you haven’t had the opportunity to yet, watch the video above.

Day Two is posted for all who are interested –

The big question for me @elixirgraphics is on the topic of ‘migration’ from v2 to v3 of Alloy. Will we need to rebuild everything that we have done previously - or is this going to be a seamless transition ?

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Hey there @DinkyPixel – Scroll back up the page a bit, and you’ll notice @jacksona asked that here.

And I gave a reply in the post right after that one. :wink:

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After dragging the embed to the page and publishing, this is what is get. The file does exist. I see it on my server. Any ideas?

Screen Shot 2020-11-18 at 10.42.41 AM

I’ll need your project file to be able to help out at all. I can’t troubleshoot anything from that screenshot. Please email me a ZIP file containing it tot adam at elixirgraphics dot com

If it is bigger than 3-4mb please send it using WeTransfer, Dropbox, or a similar service.

@aboxofbunnies Are you running Stacks v4.1 by chance? I suspect there might be a bug in that version of stacks that is breaking the Embed drag-and-drop.

Yes, 4.1.1. That may be it.

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I believe it is. Revert to v4.0 and you should be good to go: Stacks

I will try it out. Thanks.

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Cool. Let me know how it goes. Reverting to v4.0.0 until @Isaiah has a chance to look at the bug should get you up and running.

Thanks, Adam. Reverting back to version Stacks 4.0.4 did the trick!

I’ve filed a bug report with Isaiah. I’m sure he’ll get this fixed.