One of the product surfaces that we get the most feature requests around are the archives and specifically the long list of all emails you've published to the web. This page represents a bit of a third rail for how we think about Buttondown:
- there's one cohort of customers who uses Buttondown much the same way they use any blog, and for them, this page is woefully underequipped and a prime target for customization, taxonomies, and more.
- there's another cohort of customers who use Buttondown primarily for our subscriber management and deliverability, to whom archives are either marginal or entirely disabled.
A lot of what we try to do when thinking about what to build — especially for the archives! — is balancing these two spheres plus a half dozen more to make sure that everything we build benefits all customers or at least does not come at the detriment of any such customer. Building a CMS is a Sisyphean task filled with edge cases and bikesheds; we are not interested in building a CMS, but we are interested in building a simple, elegant way to let you highlight your lovely writing, and doing so in a way that causes us (and you) a minima of headaches.
So, we've added a new feature to the emails page: you can now choose to pin a post, and that will appear at the top of your archive page. It's a lovely feature — it will not change the way you use Buttondown, but it will make your archive page a little more useful and make it a little nicer for you to share your best writing (or perhaps most timely) with your readers.