Creating Change Logs

Vellum has a built-in change log feature that can be used to track changes to your documentation, or anything else that you like to track in a change log style format. Additionally a RSS feed is provided for change logs which also sanitizes the components to an RSS compliant format.

This changelog supports and correctly renders components created using markdown or bookshop components when used in CloudCannon.

An example of the changelog in use in this site can be found here.

Setup #

The only thing necessary to start using the change log feature is to flag documents as change logs. To do this, add the changeLog tag to the front matter of the document. You don’t even have to define the a changelog doc collection. However, it is required to define a doc collection with a changelog key if change logs will be created using CloudCannon. The change log will render the 10 most recent change logs when pagination is not used.

---
  _schema: default
  draft: false
  title: Added Change Log
  eleventyExcludeFromCollections: false
  date: 2025-12-24T14:00:00-07:00
  eleventyNavigation:
    key: Added Change Log
    order: 
    title:
    parent:
    url:
    icon: 
  pageLink:
  metaDesc: 
  socialImage:
  customCode:
    headCode: ""
    bodyCode: ""
+ tags: changelog
  editorial_blocks: []
---

Adding Pagination #

If you want to add pagination to your change logs, you can add a pagination object to the front matter of the page that will be used as the primary change log page. Pagination is not required, but is likely desired.

---
  _schema: default
  draft: false
  title: Changelog
  eleventyExcludeFromCollections: false
  eleventyNavigation:
    key: Changelog
    order: 100
    title:
    parent:
    url:
    icon: clipboard-document-list
  pageLink: /changelog/
+ pagination:
+   data: collections.changelog
+   size: 10
+   reverse: true
+   generatePageOnEmptyData: true
  metaDesc: 
  socialImage:
  customCode:
    headCode: ""
    bodyCode: ""
  tags: vellum
  editorial_blocks: []
---

The flag of generatePageOnEmptyData is not required, but if not set, the page will not render if there are no change logs. We set reverse: true so that the most recent change logs are at the top of the page.

After pagination has been set the changelog component will handle rendering the next and previous links.

You can learn more about 11ty pagination here.

Using the Change Log #

After there are some existing change logs created, you can then add in the changelog bookshop component into the content body of the document and it’ll render the change log.

\{\% bookshop 'simple/changelog' \%\}

Pro Tips #

Organizing Change Logs #

It is recommended to place your change logs in a separate folder from the other documentation. This will make it easier to find and manage them. If expect to generate many change logs, a fil structure such as src/docs/changelogs/<year>/<month>/<yyyy-mm-dd>-<title>.md might be useful. 11ty can infer the date from a files name if following the format of yyyy-mm-dd-<title>.md. This means that setting the date in the front matter is not required.

eleventyNavigation #

For change logs, the eleventyNavigation front matter key can be mostly ignored as the changelog collection is prevent from showing up in the collection selector. The sidebar navigation also wont render for change log pages.