Running a site on Kiln.

What you will see

1The same door as your editors

Go to yoursite.com/kiln. On the sign-in card you choose Continue with GitHub, because the site's files live in a GitHub repository you control. Everyone you invite uses the Google button.

2The Kiln button and its menu

You land on your site with a round pencil button in the bottom right corner. Move the pointer onto it (on a phone, tap it) for the Kiln menu. Publish is at the top, and below it are the tools for this page and for the whole site. Four entries are yours alone: People & access, Suggestions, Make text/images editable, and Add a gallery or events.

3A notice when there is a newer editor

Kiln checks now and then whether a newer version of the editor exists and shows you, and only you, a small notice at the top of the page when one does. What to do about it depends on your plan. See “Keeping the editor up to date” below.

The things you will do

1Decide what can be edited

People can only change the parts of a page you have marked as editable. Open ✨ Make text/images editable in the Kiln menu, click a heading, a paragraph, a picture or a list, and choose what it becomes. Click something that is already editable to switch editing off for it. The words stay; only the handle goes. Like everything else, these choices go live when you publish.

2Invite people

Open People & access in the Kiln menu and add a person by their Google email address. For each person you choose:

• Editor or Member. An editor changes the site. A member can only open your members-only pages and files. A members area has to be set up once on your host before members have anything to open: the self-hosting guide has the steps.
• How long a sign-in lasts. From 1 to 360 days, or never expiring. The form starts at 90. When it runs out they sign in again.
• For editors, which pages and sections. Leave both blank for the whole site. Everywhere else they see the page but cannot change it, and a note tells them which pages are theirs.
• For editors, which tools. Three are ticked to begin with: Page settings, History & restore and Save drafts. You can add New posts & pages, Schedule publishing, Edit site menu, Theme, Find & replace, Comments and Add sections. Two more boxes are in the list and have no effect today: Make things editable, whose menu entry only shows for you, and, on Kiln Cloud and Fully managed, AI assist, which is Self-hosted only.
• Suggest-only publishing. Tick it and their Publish button becomes Suggest changes. Their changes wait under Suggestions in your menu, where you see a before and after and press Approve or Decline.
• Reviewer preset. A seat that can leave comments and change nothing.

One email address has one role on a site. Adding an address that is already on the list replaces the earlier entry, so making an editor a member takes their editing away.

Remove ends an editor's access at once, including a session they have open. A member you remove can no longer sign in, but a browser where they are already signed in keeps working until that sign-in runs out. Give members a short access period if that matters to you.

Then send them the right page: the guide for editors or the guide for members.

3Publish, and review what others publish

You edit the same way your editors do, and the guide for editors describes it. You also have every tool you did not hand out: scheduling a publish for later, the site menu, find and replace, and the list of suggestions waiting for you. The Docs go through each one.

4Keeping the editor up to date

The editor is three files that sit in your site's assets folder. On Self-hosted and Kiln Cloud you bring in a new version yourself: open a terminal in the site's folder and run npx github:kilncms/kiln update. It copies the new files in and offers to commit and push them. On Fully managed we do this for you.

What happens when you press Publish

Nothing anyone changes is live until they publish. Publishing saves all the waiting changes on that page into the site's files in your GitHub repository as one commit, with the name of the person who made them. Your host sees the new commit and rebuilds the site. That usually takes under a minute.

Kiln then checks the live page itself. The line beside the Kiln button says Live ✓ once visitors can see the change, or Build failed, with a link to the commit, if the host could not build it. In that case the live site stays as it was.

How to undo a mistake

• Yours, before publishing. The Undo button beside the Kiln button, or Discard edits in the menu.
• Anyone's, after publishing. Open History & restore on that page. Every publish is listed with a name and a time. Undo this change takes back that one publish. Go back to this returns the whole page to how it was then. Both show you the result first and go live when you press Publish.
• One paragraph. Click into it and press the clock button on its toolbar to see that section's earlier versions.
• A person who should not have access. Remove them in People & access. For an editor it takes effect at once.

Every publish is a commit in your own repository, so nothing an editor does is hidden from you and none of it is beyond undoing.

Your plan: the trial, billing, moving, leaving

The 7-day trial (Kiln Cloud and Fully managed)

The 7 days start when you add your site in the Kiln dashboard. No card is needed, and editing works straight away. The Subscribe button on the site's row opens the checkout whenever you are ready. If you have not subscribed when the 7 days are up, the site's status changes to Canceled and editing switches off until you subscribe. Your site, your repo and everything already published are not touched. The 7 days belong to the site's address, so removing a site and adding it again does not restart them.

Billing and cancelling

Payments are handled by Lemon Squeezy, our merchant of record. Once you have subscribed, Manage billing on the site's row opens their customer portal, where you change your card or cancel. Cancelling ends editing through Kiln. It never touches your site or your repo.

Cancel before you remove a site. Remove takes the site off Kiln at once, but it does not stop the subscription, and the Manage billing button goes with the row. If that has already happened, use the link in your Lemon Squeezy receipt.

What Kiln Cloud keeps about your site

• Your GitHub username, and the public email address on your GitHub profile if you have set one.
• Each site you add: its repository name, its address, the plan, its status, the date that address was first added, and its Lemon Squeezy subscription number once you subscribe.
• The list of people you invited: email address, name, role, and what each may edit.
• Comments and suggestions made in the editor, and changes scheduled for later.
• Sign-in sessions, yours and your editors'. Your dashboard session includes a GitHub access token for your account, kept for 30 days. It is how the dashboard checks that you are allowed to register a repository.
• A fingerprint of each API token you create, never the token itself.

Your pages are not on that list. They live in your GitHub repository.

Moving between plans

Your repository never moves. What you redo is the setup around it. Going from Kiln Cloud to Self-hosted you deploy your own worker, register your own GitHub App, set up your own Google sign-in, point kiln-config.js at the new worker, and add your editors and members again. The list of people is kept with the worker, so it does not come with you, and neither do comments, suggestions, scheduled changes or API tokens. Going the other way is the same trip in reverse. Moving to or from Fully managed also moves the hosting.

Leaving

Your content is plain HTML in your repository already. To remove Kiln, delete the two script tags from your pages (kiln-config.js and kiln.js). You can also delete the Kiln files (assets/kiln*.js and kiln.html) and uninstall the GitHub App from the repository. The site keeps working, with every edit anyone made still in it.

If something goes wrong

I signed in and there is no Kiln button

That page does not load Kiln. Every page needs two script tags right before </body>, and the setup command does not add them for you. Get started, step 3, has the two lines.

“Origin not allowed”

On Kiln Cloud this means the site is not active: the trial ran out, the subscription ended, or a payment is overdue. Check the site's status in the dashboard. It also appears when the address people are using differs from the one you registered, for example with and without www.

“Kiln edits the HTML file for this page in your repo, but couldn't find one”

The page you are looking at is produced by a build tool and is not stored in your repository as an HTML file. Kiln edits HTML files. See which sites work.

An editor sees “You're not on the list (yet)”

They signed in with a Google address that is not on your list. Add the address they actually use, exactly as they typed it.

“Build failed”

The change was saved to your repository, but your host could not build the site from it. Open the commit from the link in the message to see what was saved, then use History & restore to undo that change.

Publish says it worked, and the live site never changes

Your host is not rebuilding from the repository. Kiln saves to GitHub and relies on the host to pick the change up. Whoever set the site up can run npx github:kilncms/kiln doctor, which checks exactly this.

I renamed or moved the repository

Your list of people and your Kiln Cloud registration are filed under the old name and do not follow the rename. Update kiln-config.js to the new name, add the site again in the dashboard, and add your people again.

Who do I ask?

Open an issue on GitHub, or write to [email protected]. The full reference is in the Docs.