Help Center

The Manual

While Pika is designed to be simple and easy to use, not everything can be discovered just by playing with it. If you’re the sort of person who likes to dig into the manual for your new toys, this is the place for you. And if you still find some things about Pika confusing after reading this, get in touch and we’ll get you moving in the right direction!

Table of Contents

The Editor

Pika's editor is a simple, intuitive, and powerful way to create posts and pages for your Pika site. For most people, blogging will be as easy as typing in the editor and occasionally using the toolbar to make some formatting adjustments. If you want to learn more about the editor's power features, read on.

Keyboard Shortcuts

If you hover over the toolbar items, you will learn that there are some keyboard shortcuts to speed up formatting your writing. For instance cmd+b/control+b for bolding text and cmd+k/control+k for inserting a link URL for the currently-highlighted text. Another example is hitting the TAB key to indent a bullet in your lists. You can see all of the available keyboard shortcuts in this documentation for the Pika editor’s underlying code library, TipTap.

Markdown

Markdown is a writing syntax that enables you to define formatting of your text without requiring a toolbar or other rich text controls. Pika’s editor does not require you to learn Markdown, but if you are familiar with Markdown already Pika will recognize most Markdown formatting rules. For instance, if you type "_edit_" in the Pika editor, it will be replaced with the italicized word "edit".

Draft Posts

Drafts are a way to save your writing in progress. When writing a new post, you will notice a Save as Draft button on the top of the page. Clicking this assures that you will not lose your post. Draft posts appear at the top of your posts dashboard.

Autosave to Browser

Pika does not yet have an autosave draft feature. However, Pika will autosave your text in your browser. If you ever find that your machine or browser crashed in the middle of writing a post or page, don’t panic! Reopen the same browser and navigate to the post or page you were editing and your text should still be there. Phew! If you were creating a new post or page, just go back to the Write post/Create page screens to recover your writing.

Note: this browser-based autosave feature does not save any image attachments.

Embedding Content

If you paste a YouTube link it will auto-embed the video for you. At this time Pika does not yet allow any other embedding of JavaScript or iframes in the editor.

Pika Variables

You can use special variables in your posts and pages to do things like add some recent blog posts to a custom home page.

  • {{ posts }} – Outputs a list of your blog posts. This can optionally take a limit and/or tag parameter, like {{ posts limit: 10 tag: "Bill Murray" }}.
  • {{ posts_by_year }} – Outputs a list of your blog posts, grouped by year if there are multiple. This can also optionally take a limit and/or tag parameter, like {{ posts_by_year limit: 10 tag: "Bill Murray" }}.
  • {{ tags }} – Outputs an alphabetical, comma-separated list of your blog tags. This can optionally take a separator parameter, like {{ tags separator: " | "}}.
  • {{ tag_list }} – Outputs an alphabetical HTML list of your blog tags.
  • {{ letterbird_form user: yourusername }} – Outputs your Letterbird contact form, another product we created to make it fast and easy for anyone to get a well-designed email form. This can optionally show your Letterbird’s form header with {{ letterbird_form user: yourusername showheader }}.

Known Quirks

  • The indentation tools in the toolbar only effect bullet lists and ordered lists. For instance, if you would like the second bullet in your list to be indented, click the Increase indentation toolbar item.
  • The Attach Files toolbar item (a paperclip) is a misnomer. At this time only images can be attached to your posts and pages.
  • While Pika recognizes most Markdown formatting, it cannot currently process Markdown link or image syntax.
  • Pika variables are the one thing that do not look the same in the editor as they do on your Pika site. You will have to use your imagination to visualize what a Pika variable will look like.
  • The editor does not currently support footnotes or tables.

Posts

The Posts section of your Pika dashboard is all about writing blog posts. It’s the first thing you see when logging in. Get writing!

Tags

To add or edit tags for your post, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Add tags.

Changing Published Date

To backdate your post, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Change published date. At this time you cannot schedule a post to publish in the future.

Delete a Post

To delete your post, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Delete post. You can also revert a post to draft state by clicking Unpublish.

Titleless Posts

Titles on posts are optional. If you choose not to include a title on your post, where links to your post are necessary on your site Pika will generate a link for you based on your post's content.

Pages and Navigation

The Pages section of your Pika dashboard offers more than a way to edit pages. From here you can create a custom home page, add pages to your navigation bar, and even add external links to your navigation bar.

Default Home Page

The default Pika home page includes two things:

  • The text you entered in Settings > About this blog
  • A list of your blog posts, organized by year

Custom Home Page

Clicking the dropdown arrow next to the Create page button allows you to create a custom home page. Once you save this page, it will replace the default home page. A custom home page is the one type of page that does not require a title.

Pages in Navigation

Once you’ve created a page, you can add it to your site’s navigation bar by clicking Add to nav next to the page title. To remove the page from navigation, click the Un-nav link.

If you’d like to add a link to another website in your site’s navigation bar, click the dropdown arrow next to the Create page button and select Add a link to your navigation. On the resulting form, enter a label and URL for the link. To remove the link from your navigation bar, click the Delete link.

Reorder Navigation

To change the order of the links in your navigation bar, grab the handle to the left of your page/link titles and drag them up or down.

Delete a Page

To delete your page, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Delete page.

Import and Export

Import

At this time Pika does not offer any automated import tools. However, if you have an existing blog of any significant size and would like help migrating, please get in touch and we might be able to help!

Export

To receive a fully-navigable HTML export of your Pika site, please contact us and we will get it to you right away.

I’ve read the manual and I still have questions

We’re here to help! Reach out to our team and we'll get your questions answered.