What you can do on day one
Picture a homepage hero you want on your marketing site. Before you open the composer, you need a place to put that work — a workspace. After Get Started, you land in Production. A Default Widget is already there. Open it and start composing. Development and Staging sit next to it for later.
A teammate can do the same thing the same day. They sign up, accept the license, and create their workspace. You each get an organization, a team, and three environments. Being on a team someone invited you to is not the same as having your own workspace — their dashboard still shows Get Started until they create one.
If a colleague already invited you, their team appears under Your Teams. You can accept that invitation and still create your own workspace. One account creates one organization for itself. Joining other people's teams is a different path — see Organizations & Teams.
How RuleCMS is organized
Everything you click sits in one nest: organization → team → project → environment. Get the environment wrong and you will look for a widget that is not there.
- Organization. The administrative boundary. You become an organization administrator of the one you create.
- Team. Where day-to-day work lives — members, permission groups, media, and component libraries.
- Project. A container for environments. Get Started creates
Default Project. - Environment. Development, Staging, or Production. Widgets and collections live here.
Here is the case that surprises people. You upload a hero image and draft the widget in Development. The image is already available in Staging and Production — media belongs to the team. The widget is not. It stays in Development until you publish it. Tokens, too, are per environment. Your site asks a specific environment for a published widget.
That upload can be the Images page, or an agent connected through MCP. Both put the photograph in the team library. The agent is the convenient path when the file is already a link, or you are already in the chat. It still needs Manage Media Assets, the same as the page. The steps are Images and videos with MCP.
You can belong to teams in more than one organization, and an organization can have more than one team. Each team is isolated: its own members, media, and widgets. This page gets you one workspace. Adding people and extra teams is Organizations & Teams.
Build your first workspace
You do this from the dashboard. Any protected app page asks you to sign in first. After you accept the license, the purple Get Started card is how you create the workspace.
- Open /app. If you do not have an account, create one with your email and a password. RuleCMS sends a verification email with the subject Welcome to RuleCMS. Verify your email to proceed! Verify, then sign in.
- The first time, RuleCMS shows the License Agreement. Click Accept to continue. Decline sends you back to the marketing homepage. After you accept, you are not asked again.
- You land on the dashboard. Your Teams lists every team you belong to — including pending invitations, which show Accept Invitation. Your Orgs lists organizations you administer. Account details live at /account/details when you want to change profile or login settings.
- If you have not created your own organization yet, a purple card titled Create Your Workspace (or Create Your Own Workspace if you already belong to someone else's team) has a Get Started button. Click it. You go to /app/get-started.
- Optionally type First Name and Last Name so RuleCMS can name the organization and team after you — Maya becomes
Maya's OrgandMaya's Team. Leave the fields blank and it picks paired names such asOrg-ab12cd/Team-ab12cd. You can rename both later. - Click Create My Workspace. That is the whole form.
- Wait. First you see Verifying your workspace..., then Creating your team resources — that second screen can take a couple of minutes. If either step fails, use Retry Verification or Retry Creation. Closed the browser in the middle? Open Get Started again and RuleCMS resumes at verification instead of creating a second organization.
- You land on the new Production environment. Welcome cards highlight what was just created, including the Default Widget. That is a safe stop. Open the widget, or come back to this guide's next pages when you are ready to invite someone or publish.
When the wait finishes, you have all of this:
| What you get | When you reach for it |
|---|---|
| Organization | Named from your first name, or a generated Org-… pair. You are an organization administrator. One self-created organization per account. |
| Team | Paired with the org. You are an active member. Media and component libraries live here. |
| Permission groups | Every group the team needs is created, and you are added to each one so you can build immediately. Change memberships later on a member's page — Organizations & Teams. |
| Default App | The app record environment tokens belong to. Add more apps when another site needs its own tokens — Projects, Environments & Tokens. |
| Default Project | Holds the three environments. Most first-day work stays in this project. |
| Environments | Development, Staging, and Production — one of each. You land in Production. |
| API tokens | One token per environment for Default App, created automatically. |
| Default Widget | Created in Production only — the environment you land in. Staging and Development start empty of widgets. |
What to read next
This page is the first day: sign up, license, workspace. The pages below pick up once you are standing in Production.
- Organizations & Teams — Invite a colleague, accept a team or org-admin invitation, add another team, and adjust permission groups.
- Projects, Environments & Tokens — What Development, Staging, and Production are for, how tokens work, and when to add another project or app.
- Widgets — Create and manage the pieces of content your site will embed, starting from that Default Widget or a new one.
- The Composer — The editing surface: palette, layout, and the settings you change while you build.
- Publishing — How a widget leaves Development and becomes something Staging or Production can serve.
How this fits
Getting Started is the workspace. It does not replace a widget, and it does not publish anything. Widgets are what you build. Publishing is how they leave an environment. Tokens are how your site asks for them. None of that starts until you have an organization, a team, and a Production environment to stand in.
Create the workspace once. Then open the Default Widget — or a new one — and build.