Default Content Configuration

The last block on Settings → General is headed Default Configuration, described as “Configuration and metadata that can be overridden for individual page types.” Nine fields, set once for the whole workspace, inherited by every page type that does not override them.

Four of the nine are quietly more limited than the block implies, and one of them behaves differently in the CMS than it does on your site. That is what the second half of this page is for.

How inheritance actually works

Expand a standard content page type at Settings → Page Types and you get a Configuration Overrides block rendering the same nine fields. What is different is the placeholder text: each empty field shows your company value grayed out with (default) after it.

Leave a field empty and the page type inherits the company value. Type a value and the page type owns it. There is no reset button — clearing the field back to empty is how you return to the default.

Elsewhere on the page type — in the documentation configuration — Leed makes the same idea visible a second way, printing a literal (company default) marker beside a label. It is the same inheritance model, differently drawn. That side of the page type is documented at configuring a page type.

The nine fields

Pagination — Page Minimum and Page Size

Page Size is the number of items on each generated page of a collection listing.

Page Minimum is not a threshold for turning pagination on — it is an orphan rule. After a collection is chunked into pages, if the last page would hold fewer than Page Minimum items, those leftovers are folded back into the page before it. So a 20-item collection with a page size of 9 and a minimum of 6 produces two pages of 9 and 11 rather than three of 9, 9 and 2.

Setting the minimum higher than the page size means the last chunk can never satisfy it, so the last two pages always merge. Setting it to 0 disables the rule.

Sitemap priorities

Sitemap Priority and Label Sitemap Priority are the <priority> value in the sitemap Leed generates for you, for ordinary pages and for label index pages respectively. Feeds, sitemaps and robots.txt covers the files themselves.

These two are the exception to the pattern on this page: the value that reaches the sitemap is the page type’s, not the company default you set here. The build resolves each page’s priority by looking up its page type in _data/pageTypeList.json — the type’s labelSiteMapPriority for a label-paginated page, its sitemapPriority for every other page — and falls back to 0.79 and 0.99 when the type leaves the field empty. A page with no page type at all is written as 1.

Social Title and Social Description

The fallback Open Graph card for pages that set none of their own — the model described at social cards and structured data.

The social image is part of the same stored object but has no field in this block. It comes from each page’s feature image instead.

Reading Speed

Six options: 200, 250 (recommended), 300, 350, 400, 450 words per minute. It drives the ~N min read estimate above a page’s analytics in the editor, described at page analytics in the editor, and the reading time rendered on your site.

Two footnotes, both worth knowing before you trust a number:

• The two surfaces disagree when the field is unset. The editor falls back to 250 wpm; the site build falls back to 200. So an unconfigured workspace shows a shorter estimate in the CMS than it publishes. Setting the field to anything at all makes them agree.
• A page type’s Reading Speed changes the editor and nothing else. The editor prefers the page type’s value over the company’s, so an override there does move the ~N min read you see while writing — but the value never reaches your repository, so the published reading time still comes from the company setting.

Date Format

Eleven dayjs patterns, with a live preview underneath the select that re-renders the current time every second in whichever format is chosen.

The three formats ending in z print a time-zone abbreviation. The site build resolves that against your workspace’s time zone — which falls back to UTC, because there is no time-zone field anywhere in the CMS. Settings you will not find says what that means in practice.

AI Image Theme Guide

A six-row text area describing the visual style you want generated images to follow: palette, mood, subject treatment, whatever you would tell a designer.

It is a prompt ingredient, not a rule. It steers the Feature Image generator — AI image generation — and nothing else, and it never reaches your published site at either level. A page type’s override does take effect: when a page’s feature image is generated, Leed uses the page type’s theme guide if it has one and the company’s otherwise.

Which of these your site actually receives

Company settings are serialized into src/src.11tydata.json when you publish, and that file carries a fixed set of fields. A page type’s own data file carries a much smaller one. This is the routing that decides which overrides matter.

flowchart LR
    C["Settings → General<br/>Default Configuration"]
    P["Page type →<br/>Configuration Overrides"]
    SRC["src/src.11tydata.json"]
    PT["src/&lt;slug&gt;/&lt;slug&gt;.11tydata.json"]
    LIST["_data/pageTypeList.json"]
    STOP(["Stays in the CMS"])

    C -->|"Page Minimum, Page Size, Reading Speed"| SRC
    C -->|"Social Title, Social Description, Date Format"| SRC
    C -->|"Sitemap Priority, Label Sitemap Priority, AI Image Theme Guide"| STOP
    P -->|"Social Title, Social Description, Date Format"| PT
    P -->|"Sitemap Priority, Label Sitemap Priority"| LIST
    P -->|"Page Minimum, Page Size, Reading Speed, AI Image Theme Guide"| STOP

src/src.11tydata.json carries site title and description, logo and favicon, the social handles, the deployment block, ogCard, paging, dateFormat, readingWpm, siteLocale, timezone, the highlighter configuration and your plan tier. It does not carry sitemapPriority, labelSiteMapPriority or aiTheme.

{
  "siteTitle": "Leed",
  "siteDescription": "Docs as a Service",
  "paging": { "minimum": 6, "size": 9 },
  "dateFormat": "MMM D, YYYY h:mma z",
  "readingWpm": 250,
  "ogCard": { "title": "Leed", "description": "Docs as a Service" },
  "siteLocale": "en-us",
  "timezone": null
}

A page type’s data file carries three things and no more: dateFormat, ogCard and the documentation configuration. So overriding Page Minimum, Page Size, Reading Speed or AI Image Theme Guide on a page type has no effect on the published site — not because the value is ignored, but because there is no channel to carry it. The two sitemap priorities travel separately, in _data/pageTypeList.json, alongside the rest of the page type’s list metadata, and the build reads them from there.

These files land in your repository with everything else Leed writes there. Global site data and the data cascade explains how Eleventy merges them, and what Leed writes into your repo lists the files themselves.

Saving and publishing

Every field saves 750 ms after you stop typing, and again the moment you leave it. An invalid value — a social title over 70 characters, a non-number in a numeric field — shows an inline error and is not saved; the stored value is unchanged until you fix it.

Then the difference that catches people out. The two levels track unpublished changes differently:

• On the company, every save marks the workspace as having unpublished changes and lights the amber dot — including the fields the site never reads. Editing the AI Image Theme Guide produces the same dot as changing your site title.
• On a page type, only a change to a field the build actually consumes marks the type dirty. So editing a page type’s Reading Speed produces no dot, no pending change and no effect on the site. That is consistent behavior rather than a lost save, but it looks identical to one.

Clearing the dot is the same job as always: it is saved, not live, until you deploy. Publish reminders and the must-publish model is the model and publishing changes is where you clear it. The Default Configuration block sits at the bottom of the screen described in full at general site settings.