Built with Chinaski

In-App Docs

Chinaski carries its documentation inside the admin area — Docs lists built-in articles plus articles you write yourself, all admin-only. This page covers both.

The built-in articles

Ten shipped articles ship with the app, each covering a major subsystem (this page’s index lives at Admin → Docs):

  • Blocks — creating and managing reusable content blocks; types, template format, embedding.
  • Theme Authoring — the complete Template Toolkit reference for site and block templates, with the security rules and the full variable reference.
  • LLM Theme Prompting — guidance for producing ambitious, visually distinct themes with AI assistants: design briefs, token specs, critique loops, and copy-paste prompt templates.
  • Pages & Posts — creating, editing, publishing, scheduling, categories, revisions.
  • Navigation — building menus, ordering, external links, per-language navigation.
  • Backups — creating/restoring backups, the schedule, the archive format.
  • Settings — site name, languages, SEO defaults, analytics IDs, the cookie notice, URL configuration.
  • Media Library — uploading, organizing, referencing media URLs.
  • MCP Server — the Model Context Protocol server for AI-assistant management.
  • API Reference — the complete /api/* reference (authentication, pagination, request bodies, response schemas).

The docs go deeper than the public documentation site — e.g., the Theme Authoring article carries the complete stash-variable table per template kind.

Writing your own articles

Alongside built-ins, an editable set exists for custom docs — your runbook pages for editors, house style guidelines, migration notes for a client — and is fully within-repo data:

  • New article — a title is required; the slug comes from your entry or auto-generates from the title (lowercase, hyphen-separated); invalid slug characters stripped.
  • Sort order — controls reading position on the docs index (order breaks ties by creation order).
  • Body — arbitrary body text editable per article; saved in the database (with your instance’s backups, as everything else).

The index lists your custom docs below the built-ins, sorted per your sort orders. Anything you write remains instance-local data — nothing is synced or published publicly; write runbooks as internal documentation for your team.

The docs are admin territory

Because some articles cover privileged operations (theme internals, API keys, backup layouts), every doc route incl. drafts is admin-gated — editors without an admin role never see this section.