Glossary

Terms used throughout this documentation, in one place.

Block

A small, reusable content unit that lives inside a section (for example, a button). Defined by a theme as a .liquid file with an embedded settings schema; used in content as an instance with real setting values.

Capabilities

The GET /v1/capabilities endpoint a site exposes, reporting its agent version, content schema version, and feature support — how the admin knows what a given site can do.

Checkpoint commit

An automatic, low-frequency background commit of open drafts, purely for durability — not a routine publish, and hidden from history views by default.

Content vs. theme

Content is the real, editable instances of a page’s sections and blocks. Theme is the code and schema that defines what kinds of sections and blocks exist and how they render. See Core concepts.

Draft

An unpublished, saved copy of a page’s content, stored separately from the live version until it’s published or discarded.

ETag / If-Match

The mechanism the API uses to prevent two editors from silently overwriting each other’s work: every read returns an ETag, every write must present it back, and a write against a stale ETag fails with 409 Conflict.

Field group

A set of related fields (for example, everything about a section’s background) shown together under one collapsible heading in the admin. A theme puts fields in a group with "group" in their schema.

Handle

A menu’s short identifier, such as main, which the theme uses to show it (menus.main). It’s the menu’s filename; its display name is separate and can be changed freely.

Layout

The outermost HTML wrapper for a page — <html>, <head>, navigation — defined once per theme (or per named variant) and shared across every page that uses it.

Publish

The action that promotes a draft to live, creating exactly one recorded, authored commit. The only routine action that makes content public.

Pull and push

The commands that move changes between a copy of a site on a developer’s computer and the live site, after the first deploy. Pull brings the live site down; push sends changes back, never overwriting what editors changed in the meantime. See Pull, push & upgrading.

schemaVersion

A version number on every content file, letting the CMS run automatic migrations when the shape of content changes, instead of requiring hand edits.

Section

A larger content unit that makes up a page (a hero, a feature grid). Defined by a theme, arranged and filled in by content.

Site agent

The self-hosted server that owns one site’s content, theme, and media, and exposes the versioned /v1/ API. Distributed as the @minamocms/framework package on npm.

Site settings

Values used across a whole site — social links, a contact email, a font — defined by the theme, changed in the admin’s Settings, and read in every template as settings.<name>. See Site settings.

Snippet

A small, reusable Liquid partial, invoked with render, used to avoid repeating markup across sections, blocks, or layouts.

Token scope

The permission a given access token carries — content, theme, or media. A token only ever grants what its scopes list.

vhost

The folder holding a site’s own serving configuration — site.config.json, the pinned agent dependency, and the entry point that starts the server. Not a multi-tenancy concept; a real vhost’s own scope, one per site.