Frequently Asked Questions

General

What is Typewriter?

Typewriter is a headless content management system, otherwise known as a CMS-as-a-Service. It provides the capabilities of a standard CMS but without the hassle of setting up and maintaining a web server. Typewriter communicates to the frontend of your website using standardized APIs.


How is a headless CMS useful?

Headless CMSs allow you to separate the presentation of your app or website from the implementation. Your content can be easily shared with multiple apps or websites at the same time, keeping it centralized and easily managed. If the need arises to do a redesign, you won’t be locked into any technology, enabling your frontend to be rebuilt at a much cheaper cost.


How can I integrate Typewriter into my website or app?

Through simple REST or GraphQL requests, which are possible in virtually every programming language, your application can be easily integrated into Typewriter. This can be done dynamically through a web framework like Vue, React, or Angular; Or integrated into a Static Site Generator (SSG) as this website is.


Where is Typewriter hosted?

Typewriter leverages Amazon’s AWS ‘serverless’ technology, primarily using their US East Coast region. Typewriter’s image hosting uses AWS Cloudfront, a CDN that uploads and serves your image files from geographic locations as close as possible to your users.

Account & Billing

How does billing work?

Typewriter has a usage-based subscription model that keeps your costs low and ensures that you only pay for what you use. If you need more than 1,000 requests on your API per month, you start by subscribing at the $5/month entry level. Typewriter will track and automatically add $5/month whenever your API gets another 50,000 hits. These fees will be added to your next invoice, and processed by our payment provider, Stripe.


How do I cancel my subscription?

You can easily cancel and renew your subscription from the account settings page. Your account will go back to free trial mode, and if the number of requests to your API is over the free tier limit, your API will be locked until the end of the month.


How do I close my account?

Likewise your account can be removed permanently (all content and personal data will be deleted irrevocably) from the account settings page.


How do I prevent excessive usage fees?

From your account settings page you can limit access to your API and prevent high usage charges. You can do this by limiting who access your API to a list of IP addresses you use, or by simply cutting off the number of requests your API is able to serve in a given month.


What do you do with my data?

We take your privacy seriously and would never sell or share it with another entity. Please see our privacy policy for more details..

User Interface

What is the difference between types and pages?

Types and pages in Typewriter are similar to other content management systems such as Wordpress. A page is a stand-alone entity with its own unique set of fields. This is useful for unique views such as your home page. A type, on the other hand, is a collection of items that all have the same fields. This is useful for repeating content such as blog posts.


How do I add a field to a type or page?

Above and below each field is a circle with a + symbol inside. Click on that to open up the field creation interface.


How do I add an image to a field?

In an image or gallery field, upload an image to your archive. Once in your image archive, hover over the image and click the ’+’ icon to add to the page’s field.


What are all the different field types?


  • Text - A simple text field (multiline optional)Rich Text - A WYSIWYG text editorDate - A date stored in ISO date format.Time - A time stored in ISO notation.Image - A single image from your image library.Gallery - A set of images from your image library.Type - A sorted selection of one of your types.Select - A set of text items sorted into a list where one or multiple options can be selected