Authoring Content

Star-Lite Docs offers three ways to edit content. All require logging in at /_emdash/admin/setup and toggling Edit mode in the toolbar.

Visual editing

With Edit mode on, click any text on the page to edit it in place. Text elements use contenteditable — just type and your changes appear immediately. A Save button appears in the toolbar when you have unsaved changes.

Visual editing works on any element with the data-sl-edit attribute. Most block types support inline editing for their primary text fields (titles, taglines, content).

Block editor

Hover over any block to reveal an Edit button in the top-right corner. Clicking it opens an inline property editor showing all the block's fields — titles, URLs, JSON configuration, and more.

Make your changes in the form and click Save. The form writes back to the block's data-block-props and triggers a save to the API.

This is the best way to edit structured fields like hero actions, tab configurations, or link card URLs that aren't directly visible as text on the page.

Markdown mode

Click Edit as MD in the page header to switch to a full-page markdown editor. The entire page content is serialized to markdown using emdash's portableTextToMarkdown.

Custom block types (hero, cards, tabs, etc.) appear as <!--ec:block ...--> fences in the markdown. You can edit the JSON inside these fences or leave them alone — they round-trip cleanly on save.

Click Save to convert the markdown back to Portable Text and publish. Click Cancel to return to the normal view without saving.

Copy Page MD

The Copy MD button in the page header copies the current page as markdown to your clipboard. This is useful for migrating content out of the CMS or sharing page content as plain text.

Markdown syntax

Text blocks support standard markdown formatting:

• Bold with **text**
• Italic with *text*
• Inline code with backticks
• Links with [text](url)
• ~~Strikethrough~~ with ~~text~~

Headings

Headings are automatically converted to HTML with id attributes for table of contents anchors. The TOC on the right side of the page is built from h2 and h3 headings.

Code blocks

Fenced code blocks with a language identifier are rendered by Expressive Code with Night Owl syntax themes:

Images

Standalone markdown images (![alt](url)) are automatically converted to editable docs.image blocks during preprocessing.

Tables

Markdown tables are converted to HTML tables during preprocessing:

Horizontal rules

A line containing only --- renders as a horizontal rule.

How saving works

Both visual editing and block editing save through the same flow:

1. The client calls POST /api/drop-fts to remove FTS indexes (prevents corruption during writes)
2. A PUT to /_emdash/api/content/pages/:id updates the page content
3. A POST to /_emdash/api/content/pages/:id/publish publishes the draft
4. The page reloads to show the updated content