Edit Jekyll's Liquid layouts, not just the posts

CloudCannon, Siteleaf and Decap are content editors for Jekyll: a form over front matter and Markdown, committed back to git, aimed at the person writing the posts. This is aimed at the person maintaining the theme. The element you click is found in _layouts or _includes and the bytes that change are in your own Liquid file. The two solve different problems, and if what you need is a writing interface for a colleague, a content CMS remains the better answer.

PortBay requires two markers: a _config.yml at the root, and either a _layouts/ or a _posts/ directory. Both halves are needed on purpose. _config.yml is a common enough filename that treating it as a Jekyll signal on its own would misidentify other projects, so a directory that has the config and neither directory is explicitly not detected as Jekyll.

Yes, because nothing here depends on where the site is deployed. PortBay serves your local checkout on a .test hostname with trusted HTTPS and edits the files in it; the result is an ordinary change to your working tree that you commit and push exactly as you do now. There is no build service to connect and no account to link — the edit is a diff, and git is still your deploy pipeline.

Jekyll Liquid tags are left alone. A value printed by a Liquid expression is not in the layout as words, so rewriting it would mean rewriting your template logic into a literal — which would change the page for every route that uses that layout. PortBay refuses those edits and, where the value has a real home, sends you to it: a page title lives in that page's front matter, so that is where the Page settings panel writes it.

Not on Jekyll. Structural edits are refused here rather than guessed at, because without a source coordinate on the element there is no way to be certain which occurrence of that markup you meant — and a wrong structural edit to a shared layout is a broken site rather than a wrong word. Text, class and attribute edits, plus page settings, all write. PortBay tells you which mode a project is in instead of degrading quietly.

Yes. It is stored under that page's own portbay_head_code and portbay_body_code front-matter keys, and PortBay installs a small include in the project once so your layout prints them into the real head and before the closing body tag. It is per-page rather than site-wide, and it lives in your content file, so it travels with the page in git.

No. It is a PortBay Pro feature, still in early access behind an opt-in toggle in Settings, and it is not compiled into the open-source build. It refuses to run while the site is shared over a public tunnel, and the edit bar works only on local .test hosts. Serving Jekyll on a real .test domain with trusted HTTPS is in the free app.