Markdown frontmatter

Frontmatter is the YAML between the opening --- lines of a Markdown file. It holds structured fields such as the title, date, or description. The prose below it is the body:

src/content/blog/welcome.md

---
title: Welcome
description: A short introduction
---

This paragraph is the article body.

With Markdown storage, Studio edits the frontmatter fields. Markdown body editing edits supported prose on the rendered page. Frontmatter saves follow your delivery and draft settings; body edits always require Publish.

Write multiline text

Use | when line breaks matter, or > when several source lines should form one paragraph:

caption: |-
  First line
  Second line
summary: >
  These lines form
  one paragraph.

The caption contains a line break between its two lines. The summary folds those lines into one paragraph. Studio shows multiline values in a textarea, including short strings that end with a newline. You can also request that control with format: 'textarea' in your schema.

What a save preserves

Unchanged top-level fields keep their original comments, quotes, whitespace, and multiline style. Unchanged body content and existing frontmatter fences also remain intact. Draft publication uses the same preservation rules.

A changed field is written in a standard format. Multiline text becomes a quoted string with escaped newlines; its text value still contains the same line breaks. Changing one nested property may reformat its whole top-level object, including comments inside that object. CaretCMS preserves untouched fields, not every formatting choice inside a field you edit.

Supported YAML and read errors

CaretCMS reads a subset of YAML. Anchors, aliases, tags, and some other YAML syntax are unsupported. Unsupported or malformed content produces a read error before it can be overwritten. Correct the source file, then reopen it in Studio. See Troubleshooting.

For multiline fields, the parser supports literal and folded blocks in mapping fields and sequence items. It accepts - (remove trailing newlines), the default (keep one), and + (keep trailing newlines), plus indentation indicators from 1 to 9, such as |2- or |-2. A block header on a separate line from its mapping key or sequence marker is not supported. The detailed rules follow YAML block scalar semantics.