A hosted platform
Core dna runs as a hosted platform. The rendering engine, the admin and the database run on Core dna's infrastructure. What a site's team owns is the content kept in the admin and the templates that turn that content into pages.
For an editor that split is the whole job: you work in the admin, and what you publish appears on the site. There is nothing to build or restart. Developers change the templates and deliver them to the site.
Content lives in modules
Each module stores one kind of content:
- Pages: pages arranged in a tree, the usual choice for landing pages and general content.
- Blogs: dated posts with categories and tags.
- Books: documentation read in order. A book holds units (chapters), and a unit holds pages.
- FAQs: questions and answers, grouped on FAQ pages.
- Forms: forms and the submissions they collect.
- Files: images and documents, in folders.
- Custom entities: records of a shape your site defines, such as events, stores or courses.
Commerce (see How the commerce modules fit together), automation and AI agents are modules too; this documentation has a section for each.
Layouts and areas
Every record is shown through a layout. A layout names a template and declares a set of named layout areas: the fields you fill in when you edit the record. Each area has an input type (Text, Richtext, Image, Switch, Component Collection and so on), and the template decides where each one appears on the page.
That is why two pages can look nothing alike while being edited the same way: they use different layouts.
Revisions and publishing
Content is versioned. Saving adds a version instead of overwriting the last one, and one version at a time is the active one, the version visitors see. A record is visible on the site only once it is published; until then its address answers "not found". Previewing and publishing explains both.