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What could be EVEN BETTER about Netlify products that you use? Have an idea for a killer integration? Share it here! We’re excited to hear all your rad creative ideas and consider things we maybe hadn’t thought were important.
ground rules to keep our engineers sane:
This isn’t a Support thread - if you have current issues, please post appropriately elsewhere
Please no “i want this too” type responses, use the like button instead
Keep it positive - we all get frustrated sometimes, but this is not a vent thread
Be Specific - Tell us exactly how changes you are suggesting would improve the product, the workflow, the UI, or whatever you feel could be better! The more time you spend outlining your use case the more likely we are to be able to properly consider your request.
We’re expecting that many of you will share awesome ideas - but we’re expecting that we won’t be able to implement some of them. That doesn’t mean they are bad ideas, but they might not fit with our roadmap. Doesn’t mean you aren’t smart.
I would love to be able to upload .SHTML files, or PHP files with simple includes, and have them rendered as HTML. When editing files, I like having the repetitive code (base meta tags, header, nav, footer, etc.) “out of the way” so I don’t have to deal with them. SHTML and PHP make this trivial. It can be done to some extent with jQuery .load(), but page elements tend to jump around on page load. Note that Netlify Snippets don’t really work for this purpose (as handy as snippets are) because any code that exists in a snippet cannot be previewed locally. In other words, I want to be able to build a static site with includes, and have Netlify assemble everything for the visitor. That would be lovely.
Some native way to export my Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate & private key would be wonderful, especially as its a wildcard cert. Integrating custom domains with other services often requires this information. In my case, I ran into it attempting to apply a custom domain to my Okta instance.
Without a way to export this information, it means we have to either handle these certificates outside of Netlify, and now we have sprawl in our certificate management, or we have to handle all of our certs outside of Netlify to avoid that sprawl, and now we aren’t getting that benefit out of Netlify.
Of course, using the Let’s Encrypt certs for other services would require us to set up some sort of auto-renewal for the certs ourselves, but if we have to manage our certs outside of Netlify we have to do this anyway. (And, maybe, down the road, Netlify could provide either a. some methodology of allowing integration with the certs they provide even through rotation or b. ssh access to our Netlify instance so we can set up such an integration ourselves).
Since the certificate is issued just to us based on DNS settings, and we don’t have any intention of supplying you with the necessary secret that our system generated to use the certificate, we don’t have any plans to allow export. You can of course fetch your own certificate from lets encrypt by DNS challenge, even at the same time ours is valid
I believe a natural extension to the existing branch-specific deployment is to add pattern matching. Given a pattern, such as deploy/* or [deploy]*, all branches meeting that criteria will pass. In doing so, developers can easily deploy staging/*, release/*, support/*, d-feature/* without interruption to workflow or cluttering deployments with all branches.
Accordingly, patterned context names would come before branch-specific names so they can be overridden if necessary. Also, similar to branch-specific deploys, a subdomain equivalent to the star would aid accessibility.
Example
netlify.toml
[context.'deploy/*']
command = "build command"
Then, ideally: whatever-*-is.myDomain.com
My Use Case
In my particular use case, hundreds of collaborator branches may be generated at any given time. Though only a subset of these may require deployment. Being able to add a tag or naming convention enables me to isolate only functional changes.
On the DNS page, I would like to be able to set up a set for Google Mail with one click, instead of having manually to enter the five lines of MX information. Namecheap offers this and it’s wonderful.
It would be neat to be able to set up catch-all forwarding e-mail address for each site, although that probably would require a server intercepting MX calls. I don’t think this is possible with DNS alone.
I’ve got a number of sites that initially failed to build due to CMS configuration. It was fast and easy to get them up and running but as a result each of these sites just has a small white thumbnail with “not found” in unreadable text in the thumbnail.
Based on this thread, I know that screenshots are only taken initially or not at all. I’m actually confused why “not found” is displayed instead of the placeholder image. Is this a bug?
Otherwise, would it be possible to add a small “take a screenshot” button to the individual site overview dashboard? For situations when screenshots fail to capture or undesirable screenshots are captured, this would provide an easy way to address the problem.
I really like branch deploys and how we can specify https://${branch}--${project}.netlify.com, would it be possible to add support for tag deploys too? It’d be really cool for versioning, like if my tag was v0.0.1 I could access it at https://v0-0-1--${project}.netlify.com. I realized projects like Material UI have a separate mirrored repository to work around this.
I would love a form builder, similar to Google Forms. We use HTML forms too, and that’s been working great, but we also send client feedback forms all the time, and writing them in HTML would take way to long so we end up using Google Forms. It’d be a bit more professional if we were able to do these forms on our own domain without the Google Forms branding.
Netlify Analytics recently received a new geography view allowing you to see which country is driving the most traffic. This is a good first step. For us it would be much more useful if you could split up the traffic by city though. Would like to submit this as a feature suggestion.
Hey Janosh, thanks for suggesting this. We might consider this for the future! I’ve added a note on the analytics project, and we’ll respond here if there are any updates to share.
