Editing your own site with EmDash: what you do, what stays with the developer

An admin is only worth what you can do in it without help. This article goes through the tasks you will handle yourself in EmDash, the admin behind the Astro sites we build, then the ones that call for a developer. If EmDash is new to you, start with EmDash explained for small business owners. Everything below is based on EmDash's official documentation.

Text: write, save, publish

Each piece of content opens in a form built from its fields: a title, a body, an image, sometimes a price or a date. The body is written in a block editor: headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, links, images, tables. Typing / brings up the list of available blocks.

The thing to remember is that the draft and the public version are kept apart.

• Saving happens on its own. The draft saves shortly after you stop typing. If a save fails, your text stays on screen with an error message.
• Publishing is a separate step. On content that is already live, your changes wait until you click "Publish changes". A preview shows the pending version before it goes out.
• You can schedule. Content can go live at a date and time you choose; until then, the current version stays online.
• You can go back. When a content type keeps its versions, the history shows them with what was added and removed, and an older version can be restored as a new draft.

Photos: the media library

Images, videos, audio and PDFs are uploaded once to the media library, then picked wherever the site needs them. You can also drop an image straight into a piece of text. The default size limit is 50 MB per file; SVG is excluded by default, because it can carry active code.

Three things to know:

• Alt text. It describes the image for people who cannot see it. A bare file name does not count.
• Cropping and framing. An image can be cropped (square, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 or freeform), preferably as a copy. The focal point sets which part stays visible when a layout trims the image.
• Replace or delete with care. Replacing an image in the media library changes it everywhere it is used, and the old file is not kept. Deleting a file is permanent, with no trash: check where it is used first.

Menus

Navigation menus have their own screen. You add a link to a page on the site or to any address, change the order, and place one link under another to make a submenu. A link to an unpublished page does not show on the site.

The limit is on the display side: a menu only appears where the site's code displays it, and how deep submenus can go depends on what the developer built.

Products, orders and settings

What the admin holds depends on the site. On our Site Web Essentiel plan, an online shop built on the Kai theme, you edit products, prices, text and images yourself, and orders and customers are in the admin. The Kai page on alohapixel.app sets out its shop module: stock per product, Stripe orders, refunds, shipping and invoices. The Kailua theme adds a team schedule for keeping track of appointments.

On the settings side, an admin manages the site details, users and their roles, redirects and backups. On our themes, services such as Stripe or Brevo are connected by pasting their key into the admin, with no code to write.

What remains a developer's job

EmDash manages content, not layout. Its documentation states that it is not a visual page builder: what the page shows, and how, is written in Astro components.

One in-between case is worth knowing: an admin can add a field to a content type from the admin, but that field will only show on the site if the code provides for it. And deleting a field wipes its values from every entry: that is one to leave to your provider.

On our plans, Astro and EmDash updates are included. For anything else, a change or a question is handled with a support ticket, one hour of expert work for €89.

The rule of thumb is simple: anything you fill into a field is yours, anything that changes the shape of the page belongs to the developer. Keep that line in mind and you will know before you start whether a change will take you five minutes or call for a ticket.

Also worth reading: Moving from WordPress to Astro and EmDash

See the Site Web Essentiel shopBook a support ticket