A big cycle: turn readers into members with members-only and paid content plus passwordless sign-in, bring your archive over from Ghost or Substack with images intact, build richer posts with product cards and galleries, and connect jekcms to the rest of your stack with outgoing webhooks — all on faster, cached pages.
The August cycle is one of the largest jekcms has shipped. It answers a single question we kept hearing: can jekcms grow an audience the way a modern publishing platform does — memberships, migration, monetization, integrations — without giving up on being fast and self-contained? Here is the tour.
Turn readers into members
You can now mark any post Members only or Paid members only. Anonymous readers see a clean teaser with a join call-to-action; signed-in free members read members-only pieces; premium members read everything. It works on all fourteen themes with no theme changes, and gated posts stay correct in search: they appear in your sitemap and feeds as teasers and carry Google's official paywalled-content markup, so gating is never mistaken for hiding content from crawlers.
- Passwordless sign-in. Readers join and log in with a one-time magic link sent to their inbox — no passwords to remember or reset. A minimal account page lets them manage their name and newsletter subscription, and joining doubles as newsletter opt-in.
- Selling without a gateway to configure. Paste any payment link (an iyzico or Stripe payment page) and an optional bank-transfer note in Settings. When a payment lands, one click on the Users screen upgrades the member to premium. No integration project required.
Bring your whole archive with you
Moving to jekcms should not mean leaving content behind. This cycle added first-class migration:
- Ghost and Substack import. Upload your Ghost JSON export or your Substack export ZIP as-is, and posts, pages, drafts, tags and publish dates come across. Substack "paid-only" posts automatically arrive with premium visibility, matching the membership system one to one.
- Your images come too. Images inside your posts — and each post's cover — are pulled into your own media library, converted to modern AVIF/WebP, and the content is rewritten to point at the local copies. Your migrated posts keep working even after the old site goes offline; no more hotlinked images that break later.
- Nothing is locked in. A new Export panel downloads everything as WordPress WXR, Ghost JSON or jekcms JSON — categories, tags and SEO fields included. Your content is yours to take.
A richer editor
The editor gained building blocks that used to require a plugin or a designer:
- Product and affiliate cards with an image, price, description and a call-to-action button whose link automatically carries the correct
relattributes for search-engine-compliant affiliate links. - Bookmark cards that turn any URL into a rich preview — title, description, image and site name pulled in for you.
- Galleries and social embeds — multi-column image grids, and Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok and Vimeo links that become real embeds, loaded only where they are used so pages stay light.
- Snippets — save any block of content under a name and reuse it in future posts with one click.
Connect jekcms to the rest of your stack
jekcms now talks to the tools you already use:
- Outgoing webhooks. Pick events (post published, updated or deleted, new comment, new member), add an HTTPS URL, and jekcms sends signed JSON the moment they happen — ready for Zapier, n8n or Make. Every webhook shows its recent deliveries right underneath, and a single button re-sends any delivery that failed while your endpoint was briefly down.
- Targeted newsletters. Campaigns can now be sent to a saved audience segment instead of the whole list.
- Conversation notifications. When someone replies in a comment thread, everyone above them is notified once, each with a one-click unsubscribe link.
- Reactions on every theme. A lightweight emoji reaction bar appears under posts with live counts, fully compatible with the page cache.
Multilingual content, done simply
Give any post a language and link it to its translated counterpart from the editor's new Translation box. Linked pairs automatically emit the right hreflang tags so search engines serve the correct language, while your archives, sitemap and feeds keep showing just your site language and each translation lives at its own address.
Faster pages for every visitor
A full-page cache now serves your homepage, posts and archive pages to anonymous visitors straight from disk. In local measurements, pages that took 60–200 ms now render in single-digit milliseconds — the same content, delivered several times faster, with no work on your part.
Quietly, continuously hardened
Every release this cycle passed through independent security reviews, and each one shipped with its fixes already applied — before the version reached you. We do not publish the details of what those reviews probe; the point you should feel is simply that memberships, payments, integrations and migration all arrived already reviewed, not bolted on and audited later.
The complete, itemized list is always in the changelog. If you have been waiting to move a membership newsletter or a paid archive onto something you fully control, this is the release to try.
