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Welcome to the New Potion

What’s new

The real question is what’s not new 😅! The new Potion is a complete rebuild of the product. The main focus was put on reliability and performance of sites built using Potion as well as the Potion Dashboard itself. That being said, you will also find some interesting new functionality.

1️⃣ Official Notion Integration

As you’ll notice when creating your account. Potion is now a Notion integration leveraging the official Notion API and using secure OAuth tokens to connect to your page’s content. You no longer need to publish your Notion page on the web before creating a Potion site from it.

This seem like a minor change but it has a big impact:

2️⃣ Sync Engine & CDN

When visitors come your site, Potion serves your page, as well as Notion hosted files on that page, from content cached on our CDN. This cuts down on the number of database and API requests necessary to build your page which improves reliability and makes your Potion site load much faster. Syncs happen either automatically or manually from the dashboard.

The sync engine supports sync paused, draft, and archive page statuses. This is soooooo useful:

  1. When creating new pages mark it as draft to make Potion wait until it’s ready before it creates that page on your site.
  1. Set the page status to sync paused before you start making changes to it … then take your time as you make it just perfect. Because sync is paused, Potion will continue serving the last version it synced to site visitors who will not see your work in progress until it’s ready.
  1. A page should no longer appear on your site but you’re not ready to completely delete it from Notion? Set its status to archive and that page will disappear from your site on the next sync .

3️⃣ Notion Wiki Support

Notion Wikis are a very convenient way to create and maintain content. Potion now supports creating sites from Notion Wikis but we didn’t merely add support for a Notion Wiki, we fully embraced it 😍.

Turning your page into a Notion Wiki before creating a Potion site from it enables advanced features like icon Managing URLs and controls on icon Publishing & Syncing Content.

4️⃣ New Rendering Engine with Sidebars and Footers

We completely rebuilt the renderer transforming your Notion content into HTML (if you’re curious, it’s built using Svelte). Potion now renders your pages on the server and serves clean HTML to site visitors (and search engines). This makes your content accessible without relying on complex browser side JavaScript and it works better with trackers from popular analytics tools.

As with anything new, it has sharp edges and support for all Notion blocks is not complete yet. We’re getting there!

Layout Slots

The new Potion renderer supports putting some content from your page in a left sidebar, a right sidebar or a footer. These elements are convenient to create secondary navigation that stay visible as visitors scroll through your page content.

5️⃣ Improved Custom Style Editor

The live editor in the Potion Dashboard has been vastly improved:

  • What you see is your actual site, not a different internal preview render
  • It allows easy customization of different Notion block types are formatted
  • Individual blocks on any given page can be assign custom styles
  • Select between fixed and fluid layouts with varying content width setting

6️⃣ Hierarchical URL structure

Potion now generates URLs which match the hierarchy of your content in Notion. This means that the URL for a child page will contain the path of the URL of its parent.

Even better, you can easily set your own URL slug for your pages from the Notion app. This feature is supported on Potion sites created from a Notion Wiki.

Finally, accented and other non-ascii characters are no longer skipped when generating the URL slug for your page. They’re converted to the closest corresponding ascii character. This gives URLs with better readability in languages other than English.

7️⃣ Improved Navigation Menu

The navigation menu now support custom fonts, dropdown menus on items, and more than one link to an external site. As you can see, the navigation of this site uses items with dropdowns.

8️⃣ Manage SEO content within Notion

Setting page titles and meta description on your pages for SEO no longer require logging in your Potion account, these values can be set from the content of your page in the Notion app.