Skip to main content

The content console

This is the screen you spend your day in. An agent builds the site through files and API calls; you open the console to look at what it built, fix a sentence, move a page into the right folder, and put things away.

The console is at /console/content on your Shio instance. Everything below is reachable from that first screen.

The content browser​

A site is a tree of folders holding posts. The browser walks it the way a file browser does: click a folder to go in, use the breadcrumb to come back out.

  • Breadcrumb — the path from the site down to where you are. Every segment is clickable.
  • New [Post Type] — creates a post of the type you used last, remembered per browser. The grid icon beside it opens the full post-type picker if you want a different one.
  • New Folder and Import sit next to it.
  • Sort, Select, Action in batch are on the right.

Each row shows the item's name, when it changed, its type, and — on hover — the actions for that one item: view, edit, clone, copy, move, delete.

The listing is paged, and folders are not​

Posts arrive 50 at a time. Folders do not: a folder's children folders are all returned at once, so the folder half of the screen is always complete.

The counter above the list is the folder's real post count, not the number of rows loaded. If it says 480 and you can see 50, both numbers are correct — and this is the distinction that decides what "select all" means, below.

The post form​

Opening a post gives you a form generated from its post type. You are not editing JSON; you are filling in the fields somebody modelled, in the order they modelled them.

  • Each field is a card, colour-coded by its widget (text, rich text, date, a reference to another post, a repeating group, and so on). See Content Modeling for what each widget does.
  • A field marked with * is required and the form will not save without it.
  • Fields can be grouped into tabs by whoever modelled the type.
  • The save bar is sticky at the top: it stays visible however long the form is, and carries the post's title, its type, its field count, and whether you have permission to publish it.
  • Save keeps you on the form. Save & Close returns you to the folder.

Saving writes a draft. Publishing is a separate act with its own permission — see Letting an agent in for the full draft-and-publish model.

The Media Library​

Content → Media Library is where every file lives: images, video, audio, documents, archives. It is one screen, not two — the media browser and the static-file manager are the same thing.

  • Upload by dragging files onto the page or clicking Upload. Pick the site to upload into first. A file added through a File field on a post lands here too.
  • Browse as a grid or a list, filter by category (Images, Videos, Audio, Documents, Archives, Other), or search by name.
  • Each file shows its type, size, folder, upload date and — for images — its dimensions.
  • Copy URL puts the file's public URL on the clipboard; Download fetches it.
  • Select several files to move, copy or delete them in one go. A media delete is not the reversible trash — the confirmation says so.

Selecting a file opens its details, where you can set:

  • Alt text — describes the image for accessibility and search engines.
  • Caption — optional.
  • Tags — type and press Enter.
  • Used in — the content that references this file, or "Not referenced by any content". Check it before deleting.

Those three values are declared fields on the File content type, alongside the path, checksum, size and image dimensions Shio stamps on upload. So they are not only a dialog: they appear when you open the file as a post, they are part of the type's schema for anything reading it over the API, and shio verify treats them as known fields rather than reporting a captioned image as carrying data its model does not describe.

Copy and move​

Both start the same way: pick one or more items, choose Copy or Move, and a dialog walks down from the site root so you can choose a destination folder.

Cloning is the shortcut for the common case: copy an item into the folder it is already in.

What a copy does to names​

A copy takes names that are free. Cloning a page called Home at /home gives you Home (2) at /home-2. The title moves with the URL, so you never end up with two rows you cannot tell apart. Copying a folder renames the folder the same way.

The two counters are independent, because they live in different scopes: a title is unique within its folder, a URL is unique within the site. Copy Home into a different folder of the same site and it keeps the title Home, and only the URL gets a number.

Copying a folder copies its files​

A folder full of images copies as a folder full of images: each copied file gets its own stored bytes, not a pointer at the original's. That matters when you later delete one of them — removing an image from the original section leaves the copy's image working.

What a move does to names​

A move relocates and changes nothing else. The post keeps its URL — which is the point, because that URL may be live and linked from elsewhere. A post that has no URL yet gets one on the way.

If the destination site already has something at that URL, the move is refused with an error telling you what is in the way. It is never silently renamed: a published page quietly changing address is exactly the surprise this refuses to cause.

What the dialog will not let you do​

You cannot move or copy a folder into itself or into anything inside it. Those folders appear in the picker greyed out rather than hidden, so you can see that the folder you are looking for is the one you are dragging, and the confirm button says why it is disabled.

Permission is checked at both ends​

  • A move needs write permission on the destination and on every item you are moving. Moving something out of a folder is a removal from that folder's point of view, and it is authorized as one.
  • A copy needs write on the destination and read on every source.

The check runs over the whole selection before anything moves. A batch you are only partly allowed to move moves nothing — it does not relocate the items you happened to list first and then stop.

The console and the agent surface enforce the identical rule. Where they ever disagreed, the stricter one was the correct one.

Selecting more than one thing​

The Select menu is the part whose behaviour is genuinely not guessable from the checkbox, so it is worth reading once.

ChoiceWhat it selects
FoldersEvery folder here. Folders are never paged, so this really is all of them.
ContentEvery post that matches — not just the 50 on screen. It pages the rest in first.
EverythingBoth of the above.
InvertThe rows currently loaded, inverted.
NothingClears the selection.

Two consequences worth having in mind:

  • "Content" and "Everything" are about the whole folder. Choosing one on a folder of 480 posts selects 480 posts, and the delete dialog will say 480. That is deliberate: a dialog that said "50 item(s)" and left 430 behind is how a curator concludes a folder is empty when it is not.
  • "Invert" is about the screen. Inverting a set that includes rows nobody has looked at is not a gesture anyone means, so it does not.

There is a ceiling of 1000 items. Past it, the selection stops and tells you how many of how many it took, rather than pulling an unbounded folder into your browser. The number in the confirmation dialog is always the number that will actually be acted on.

Action in batch is enabled only while something is selected, and applies the action to the selection.

The trash​

Deleting is reversible. Deleting a post or a folder marks it deleted; it does not remove it.

  • Deleting a folder trashes everything beneath it — every post, every sub-folder — as one act, stamped with one instant.
  • Trashed items disappear from the browser everywhere, including from search and from the delivery API. To a reader the site behaves as though they are gone.
  • The trash page lists what was deleted. A deleted folder appears as one row for the deletion, not one row per folder inside it, because the deletion is what you would undo.

Each row offers two things:

  • Restore puts back exactly what that deletion removed. Something that was already in the trash before that delete stays in the trash — restoring a folder does not resurrect things you threw away last month that happen to live inside it.
  • Purge is the permanent one. This is where the content is really removed, where its uploaded files are cleaned up, and where any webhook subscribers are told it is gone. A reversible delete deliberately has none of those side effects.

Nothing expires the trash on a timer. Items stay until somebody purges them, so "delete" is safe and "purge" is the one to be careful with.

Deleting a site is different: it purges. There is no undo at site level.

Every delete, restore and purge is attributed to whoever did it and recorded in the activity history.

ON THIS PAGE