How can I edit anything?

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1

I am new to datocms. I have a stupid question.

How can I edit CSS styles for my website?
how can i edit global parameters for svg?

I would like to add this line to my

<img src=“myimge.svg” alt=“pictogram” style="width: 100%; height: auto; aspect-ratio: 1 / 1;">

2

Hi @martinS,

Welcome to DatoCMS!

It’s not a stupid question at all, but a totally fair one :slight_smile: Unlike traditional CMSes (Wordpress, etc.), we are a “headless” CMS and we don’t touch your frontend code at all.

Your frontend code typically lives on a completely separate service (commonly, the repo for it is on Github or similar, and deployed on Vercel/Netlify/S3/etc.). That’s where you would have to edit your CSS.

If you used one of our starter projects, it depends on whether you chose to have it set up the website for you on Netlify/Vercel. If so, it would’ve also forked our code to your Github account. You can edit it by fetching that repo to your local machine, editing the code, and then pushing it back to Github. Then the host should rebuild it.

Does all that make sense? If you’ve never worked with a headless CMS and a Jamstack (JS + API-based website) before, our DatoCMS Academy has some guides that might help.

Or if you’re not a web developer (sorry, it wasn’t super clear from your post!), this will be a little more difficult… :sweat_smile: Can you let me know your setup, please, and I can try to provide more detailed guidance in that case?

3

Roger thank you for your quick reply!

Yes, I’m not a developer, but I purchased a project in DatoCMS. I just wanted to check if I have everything needed for my programmer to edit the website.

So to sum up, do I still need access to the project on GitHub from the seller?
my plan is: Professional 2021 + record size 1 plan

4

@martinS: Ah ok, glad to hear you’re working with a programmer :slight_smile: It’d be hard to use a headless system without one!

In that case, it’s really up to them how they want to set up your frontend. Are you trying to get them to use one of our starter projects, or did you have some other website template in mind already, or are they making you a website from scratch…?

Basically, to break it down a bit:

  1. What you pay us for (thank you!) is the headless CMS (the editor experience you see when you login to your-project.admin.datocms.com). This is what you’ll be using to edit your website content.
  2. However, your programmer has to host the actual website frontend somewhere else. We don’t do that, since that isn’t part of our business. If you use one of our starter projects, by default we’ll put it on one of our partners’ services for you: Netlify or Vercel (you choose when you make a project). For the starter demos, we use their free plans. Once your website starts seeing production traffic, it’d probably be a good idea to upgrade to one of their paid plans, for better limits and support. This is the finished website that your visitors see.
  3. Separately from your payments to anyone, typically your website code also lives somewhere else. By default we use a service called “Github”, which is a code storage service that helps programmers keep track of changes in the code over time. (Your programmer will know what this does). This is where your programmer goes to edit your code to add the SVG (or anything else).

Who is “the seller” in this case? The programmer? It depends on who set up the current code initially. If you used one of our starter kits, it’ll be under your Github account (do you remember setting one up?), and you’ll have to share that with them.

If they set it up at first and you want to edit the code yourself, then yes, they’ll have to share access to it with you. But aren’t you paying them to be a programmer for you so you don’t have to do that…? :sweat_smile: It should only take them a minute to add that image on your behalf.

Does all that help? I’m still not super clear about how your whole project was set up, so if you can please share some details about that part of it (i.e. who made the website, where it lives, and all that), I can try to provide more specific help :slight_smile: If there are any privacy concerns, please feel free to either DM me here or email us at support@datocms.com and mention this thread.