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: