Back to work: new improvements live in Labrador CMS
August 2026
Hi, Labrador CMS users. Many incremental changes go live in Labrador CMS this week, and more roll out over the next few weeks. None of them touch what you do on deadline — where action is needed, it's marked below. Thanks for the bug reports and feature requests that shaped this round. Keep sending them.
Five things we changed in Labrador CMS:
The text editor no longer stumbles on paste and formatting. Live now. No action needed.
More of your articles show up in Google and Google News. Live now. No action needed.
Labrador AI moves to newer models. Rolling out over the next few weeks.
Labrador now drafts your site's AI voice prompt for you. Live now. Opt in.
Front pages rebuild about a third faster after you publish. Live now, no action needed.
The editor you write in is faster and more stable
Live now, no action needed
The body-text editor you write in is now faster and more stable. It became the default just before sommer June, for articles, notices, fact boxes, recipes and multiline text, resolving months of paste and formatting bugs along the way. Saving, publishing and your keyboard shortcuts are unchanged; it also shows live word count, character count and read time as you type.
Editor action: None.
Journalist tip: Did you know that if you click outside the editor, you can undo all steps, including image placements and formatting.
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More of your articles show up in Google and Google News
Live now, no action needed
A handful of sitemap and indexing improvements were done to show your work from search: canonical links on translated articles, publication dates, and image sizes are now handled better in the news sitemap. All fixed and runs automatically — nothing changes in how you publish.
Editor action: None.
Journalist tip: Did you know that Google favours articles with more original sources? Thats good news for journalism.
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Labrador AI runs on newer models
Rolling out the next weeks
Nothing changes in how you use it — same buttons, same approval step before anything saves. Labrador AI is moving to GPT-5.6, Claude Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash for captions, tags, metadata and text suggestions.
Editor action: None. GPT 5.6 will be the new default when your site gets the update.
Journalist tip: Did you know you can tweak the prompt of factboxes per article, by using advanced settings: "Focus on the victim", "Concentrate on numbers" wil give you completely different factboxes.
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Generate your site's AI voice prompts in one click
Live now, opt-in
Prompting can be hard. Instead of writing AI instructions by hand, Labrador CMS can now read your site's own published content and draft a tailored prompt — tone, style, house rules — for you to review and approve. Editors and journalist are surprised of how detailed and to the point it is. Texts suddenly feels like ours. The tech behind the scenes is very cool, it spins of an agent that works for several minutes, so be patient.
Sample title prompt for New York Times (not a customer yet :D ):
"Titles should be concise (typically 6-12 words), in sentence case, and written in a direct news register rather than clickbait style. Favor factual, declarative headlines over questions or vague teasers, and ensure accuracy and neutrality since headlines are heavily scrutinized for perceived bias. For opinion pieces, headlines may be prefixed conceptually with 'Opinion' and can be more interpretive or provocative, but still grounded in the writer's actual argument. Subtitles should add specific context (who, what, why it matters) not repeated from the title."
Editor action: Ask your site admin to try it in AI settings › Prompt generator. Optional.
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Front pages take less time to rebuild after you publish
Live now, no action needed
When a front page needs to regenerate — right after you publish or update something — that rebuild now takes about a third less time on pages with lots of images. Cached pages, which is most reader traffic, are unaffected either way.
Editor action: None.
Also live, if you missed them: automatic list formatting in the text editor, larger image previews in Google search results, better accessibility on fact boxes and mobile tables, AP newswire import, one-click article audio text to speech by Beyondwords, and a European-hosted AI option on Mistral's models — all opt-in or automatic, all in the full changelog.
Running Tulo or Kilkaya? Subscriber tracking and metadata just got more accurate — ask your account manager.
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This month's tip
Add any RSS or Atom feed as a content source
Admin › Content sources › Add source, then paste the feed URL. Labrador pulls in RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds as regular content you can use like any other source — handy for wire feeds, syndicated columns or a partner site's headlines. Support still gets asked how to do this every week, so here's the answer, in the open. Ask your site admin if you need it.
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What in Labrador wastes ten minutes of your day that it shouldn't? Reply to jan (at) labradorcms.com and tell me .
Jan Thoresen,
CEO, Labrador CMS