Hammer for Mac — Preview: 0.16.2

:hammer: Hammer for Mac — Preview: 0.16.2

Welcome to the discussion thread for this Hammer for Mac Preview Build.

Use this space to share feedback, report issues, and discuss your experience with other testers and the team.

:magnifying_glass_tilted_left: Build Information

  • Version: 0.16.2

  • Build: 1

  • Release Date: 31st Dec 2025

  • Platform: macOS 15.0

  • Distribution: Private Invite Only

:sparkles: Highlights

This release introduces major new features for project management, content planning, and template flexibility. The Project Overview Dashboard provides a centralised view for managing projects, while the comprehensive Content Planning System helps you organise campaigns, research, and content creation. Collection loop sorting gives you powerful control over how content is displayed in templates.

Project Overview Dashboard - PREVIEW VERSION

Centralised project management: The new Project Overview Dashboard provides a visual interface for managing your projects. Edit project details, embed videos, and customise project headers with gradient presets. The dashboard offers a flow-based layout that adapts to your project structure.

Project editing: Enhanced project editing capabilities allow you to manage project metadata, styles, and visual elements all in one place. The dashboard integrates seamlessly with your existing workflow.

Content Planning System - PREVIEW VERSION

Campaign management (Phase 1): Organise your content creation with campaign management. The system automatically scaffolds directories and provides a foundation for planning workflows. Create campaigns to group related content and track progress across multiple projects.

Plan management (Phase 2): The plan editor lets you create, edit, and manage content plans with import/export functionality. Drag and drop reordering makes it easy to organise your planned content. Validation ensures your plans are structured correctly before execution.

Research management (Phase 3): Import, convert, and edit research materials to support your content creation. The simplified card-based interface makes it easy to manage research documents and convert them into content plans.

Unified content and planning view: Content planning is now integrated into the Content tab with a unified view. Switch between Content and Planning modes using the segmented control. The improved drafts workflow includes conditional generate buttons and better layout organisation.

Collection Loop Sorting

Powerful template control: Sort collection loops directly in your templates using sort attributes. Use single or multiple field sorting with ascending/descending order.

Syntax examples:


<!-- @loop post in collections.post sort="date:desc" -->

<!-- @loop post in collections.post sort="date:desc,category:asc" -->

Works with Date, String, and Number field types.

Flexible sorting: Sort by any field in your content metadata. Multiple sort fields allow for complex ordering (e.g., sort by date descending, then by category ascending). This gives you complete control over how content appears in your templates.

Enhanced Forge Integration

Three-state publish button: The Publish button now clearly shows your Forge connection status: Not Connected, Connected (not linked), or Connected + Linked. Forge branding with orange button colour and ForgeIcon badge makes it easy to identify linked sites.

Quick actions: When a site is linked to Forge, quick action buttons appear for opening the site (arrow icon) and managing it on Forge (cog icon). This streamlines your deployment workflow.

Draft Management Improvements

Update vs. Publish: The system now intelligently shows an Update button when a draft corresponds to existing content, or a Publish button for new content. This prevents accidental overwrites and makes the workflow clearer.

Improved draft cards: Enhanced draft card layout displays title, updated time, and file path in a clear, stacked format. Better visual hierarchy makes it easier to identify and manage your drafts.

Enhanced Markdown Processing

Better code block handling: Markdown code blocks now support language identifiers, proper whitespace preservation, HTML escaping, and language class support for syntax highlighting.

Example:


```swift

func example() {

print("Hello, World!")

}

```

Code blocks are processed first to avoid markdown processing inside code content.

Improved block-level elements: Enhanced handling of block-level HTML elements including headings, horizontal rules, and pre tags. Better whitespace preservation ensures your formatted content renders correctly.

See Changelog - Hammer for Mac for complete list of updates in this pre-release.

:speech_balloon: Feedback & Discussion

We’d love your input on:

  • Your overall experience with this build

  • How the Project Overview Dashboard works for your workflow

  • Your experience with the Content Planning System (campaigns, plans, research)

  • How collection loop sorting improves your templates

  • The enhanced Forge integration and three-state publish button

  • Draft management workflow improvements

  • Markdown code block and formatting handling

  • Any crashes, UI issues, or unexpected behaviors

  • Feature suggestions or workflow feedback

:light_bulb: Tip: When reporting an issue, include:

  • Steps to reproduce

  • Expected vs. actual result

  • macOS version

  • Logs, screencasts or screenshots if possible

:package: Installation / Update Notes

  • Don’t use Dropbox sync’d folder for your Site location due to system event chaos.

  • Collection loop sorting requires proper field names in your content metadata. Ensure date fields are properly formatted as Date objects for best results.

  • The Content Planning System creates new directory structures. Review the scaffolded directories to understand the organization before adding content.

  • Enhanced markdown processing may affect existing code blocks. Review rendered output to ensure formatting is preserved as expected.

:wrench: Resources


Thank you for testing!

Your feedback directly helps shape the next version of Hammer for Mac.

1 Like

A markdown request: Indented blocks - could you output a div or something with a class called “indent” so that it can be used? I used IA Writer to edit the text, and VS Code shows it indented too, but when converted to HTML it is just plain p tags. I can understand that, but if it were wrapped, it would allow customisation of that block. Thanks!

(Edit: I just tried to stick the div in myself, and the content between the start/end is no longer tags, so it becomes html and I lose the markdown formatting of the content.)
(Edit2: I think I sort of appreciate how good the basic “oh look, there’s an HTML tag, I’ll output until I find the closing tag”, but it would be nice to be able to use an alternative that allows the markdown in the middle. I think perhaps I’m asking too much.)

1 Like

Ive sort of written a basic markdown parser/renderer rather than an off the shelf option mainly because I didn’t find one that I liked in Swift land.

Upside: This means I can have full control.
Downside: This means I can have full control.

I also agree that there’s some behaviours that I’m appreciating. There’s some other little nits that exist and I need to fix (line spacing after <hr> tags being top of mind)

Happy to consider ideas and proposals. Do you have some more specific examples? Some code snippets might help

A thing for your markdown processor: if in an HTML tag, don’t handle underscore as emphasis.

src="images/flags/flag_great_britain16.png"
becomes
src=”http://localhost:8080/images/flags/flag<em>great</em>britain16.png”

1 Like

I added an “order” field to my collection, and the ordering works - great!
I am now wanting to not include things in a loop that have an order less than 100. This doesn’t seem to work.

  <!-- @loop post in collections.mycontent  sort="order:asc" -->
                <!-- @if post.order > 99 -->

With this, nothing gets displayed. When I inverted the > to < everything gets displayed, which makes me think that numeric conditionals don’t work?

Which reminds me - I can declare a variable in an included, but I’d really like to be able to override it in a specific file that included that file, thus being able to change it. Hmm, shouldn’t post two ideas in one message, never mind. Still liking it!

1 Like

Hi, have my main target pretty much complete now. Was just going through and fixing some broken links in my conversion, and all was going well (at least 20 rebuilds this morning) but now Hammer has stopped processing my content files. I cannot fathom what has changed, because I didn’t change anything important. There is no mention of a problem in the Engine Log (would be nice to be able to clear it, and to be able to select and copy a bit of it to here!).

I cleared the cache, checked my settings, and tried a load of things (cache on/off, and anything I can think of).

OMG! I went looking at the Content tab, and clicked on a random content file, and the audit icon. It popped up and said there was a duplicate favicon.ico file. What? Okay, I changed that a few versions back. Remove the one in /images, and the rebuild works now. So, my immediate issue is fixed, but whatever that problem is, it should be output in the errors or build log.

So, really nice tool, hope it continues to develop. Thank you!

1 Like

Great stuff. I’ve logged the bug re favicon and the error surfacing, will resolve that in next build.

Fantastic to see you really leaning in and thanks so much for sharing your progress.

I am excited to keep developing Hammer, it’s become core to my product marketing and experimentation workflows.

One of the things I have been working on the past few weeks is a headless CLI version of Hammer.

WHY?

Because I’m exploring the human-ai workflow collaboration.

Hammer GUI for humans.
Hammer-cli for AI agent assist.

Same tool and workflow, best interface and modality for each audience.

More to share on that soon!

Keep the ideas and feedback coming.

Got this, I will certainly look at further extensions to the loop tag, I can see these being very useful / necessary

Hi! Glad to see you’re rebuilding Hammer. I’m interested in trying this out. Is there any way I can mess around with the preview?

1 Like

I’ll send you an invite!