Introduction

When you export content to your CMS, Cloudpress will automatically convert the content to the correct format for your CMS. For example, WordPress uses Gutenberg blocks, so Cloudpress will convert the content from your Google Doc or Notion page into the correct Gutenberg blocks.

Other CMSs also have their proprietary format. Sanity, for example, uses Portable Text. Contentful can store content as either markdown (for Long Text fields) or rich text (for rich text fields). In all cases, Cloudpress will convert the content from Google Docs or Notion into the correct format.

Sometimes, you may want to export content to your CMS that Cloudpress does not support because there may not be a corresponding type of content in Google Docs or Notion.

For example, if you use WordPress, you may want to include a call to action or email sign-up form inside your blog post. Since neither Google Docs nor Notion is familiar with this concept, there is no way to add this to your source document.

Cloudpress has a feature called Raw Content Blocks to work around this limitation. Raw content blocks allow you to send “raw” content to your underlying CMS; in other words, send content in the format native to your CMS.

In this document, we discuss Raw Content Blocks at a high level. For practical use cases, please refer to the following documentation that demonstrates how to export custom content from Google Docs and Notion to the various CMSs:

Using raw content blocks in Google Docs

To export raw content from Google Docs, add a single-cell table to your document - in other words, a table with one row and one column.

Give the table a dotted border by placing your cursor inside the table and selecting the dotted border from the Border dash toolbar item.

Then, put the raw content in the format that your CMS will understand inside the table. The image below demonstrates a single-cell table with a dotted border that includes some source code for exporting Gutenberg blocks to WordPress.

Next, you will need to instruct Cloudpress to interpret the content of the table as raw content. The procedure differs depending on whether you use the Cloudpress Google Docs Add-on or the Export Content page.

Enabling raw content during export

After adding the raw content to your document, you must tell Cloudpress to interpret the table with the content as raw content during the export. This process differs depending on whether you use the Google Docs Add-on or the Export Content page.

Demo video

The following video walks you through this feature by exporting custom Gutenberg blocks from Google Docs to WordPress.

Using raw content blocks in Notion

Cloudpress uses Code blocks to denote raw content in Notion. However, code blocks are also used when you want to include code snippets in your content. For example, you may have a blog geared towards software developers and often include code snippets in your content. In this case, you can instruct Cloudpress to treat only code blocks in a specific language as raw content and all others as code blocks.

Enable raw content for your Notion connection

Go to the Connections page in Cloudpress and click on your Notion connection. Go to the Content Conversion tab.

  1. In the Raw content blocks section, enable the option to convert code blocks to raw content. With this enabled, Cloudpress will treat all code blocks as raw content.
  2. Next, limit raw content only to a specific language. As mentioned before, this is useful when using code blocks for code snippets. In the screenshot below, you can see that Cloudpress will only treat code blocks for HTML as raw content. All other code blocks will be exported as code blocks.

Click Save Changes to save your changes. Cloudpress will now treat code blocks for the specified language in all pages exported from this connection as raw content.

Add raw content to your Notion page

To include raw content, add a code block to your page.

Place the raw content for your CMS inside the code block and set the language for the code block to the same language you configured in your connection settings.

The screenshot below demonstrates a code block containing raw content for a WordPress blog and the language set to HTML.

The following video walks you through this feature by exporting custom Gutenberg blocks from Notion to WordPress.