Overview
RuleCMS is a visual content platform for building responsive pages with a drag-and-drop composer, publishing to staging and production, and delivering content to your own websites and apps through tokens and a public API. This guide walks through account creation, first-time setup, and the hierarchy you will navigate every day.
Sign up and sign in
RuleCMS uses email-based authentication powered by AWS Cognito through Amplify. When you visit any protected page (for example /app), the Amplify Authenticator prompts you to sign in or create an account.
- Sign up — enter your email address and choose a password. RuleCMS sends a verification email with subject Welcome to RuleCMS. Verify your email to proceed! You must verify before you can sign in.
- Sign in — use your verified email and password on any protected route.
License agreement
The first time you access the app after signing in, RuleCMS presents the RuleCMS Composer License Agreement. You must click Accept to continue. Declining returns you to the marketing homepage. The agreement is stored per user and does not need to be re-accepted on subsequent visits.
Your dashboard
After accepting the license, you land on /app — your personal dashboard. It shows:
- Your teams — every team you belong to, including pending invitations (members who have not yet joined).
- Organizations you administer — orgs where you are an org administrator, including pending admin invitations.
- A link to Get Started if you have not yet provisioned your own environment.
Account details are available at /account/details.
First-time provisioning (Get Started)
New users who need their own organization, team, and project go to /app/get-started. This flow requires:
- First name (required)
- Last name (optional)
- A 5-character invitation code (alphanumeric, case insensitive) — required during the public launch period
Submitting the form calls POST /api/v1/d/user-environment-setup, which creates the full environment in one cascade. You are then redirected to your new Development environment with ?newEntries=true so the welcome cards highlight what was created.
What gets created during provisioning
| Entity | Default name / behavior |
|---|---|
| Organization | {firstName}'s Org — with a random suffix if that name already exists. You become an organization administrator. |
| Team | {firstName}'s Team — the working unit where content, media, and component libraries live. |
| Team member | You, as an active member of the new team. |
| User groups | Every user group defined in the RuleCMS permissions system is created for the team, and you are added to each one. This gives the provisioning user full access to start building immediately. Adjust memberships later on each member's detail page — see Organizations & Teams. |
| App | Default App — registered in the external app registry for token-based API access. |
| Project | Default Project — container for environments. |
| Environments | Development, Staging, and Production — three environments per project. |
| API tokens | One token per environment for the default app, created automatically. See Projects, Environments & Tokens. |
| Development-only defaults | An empty default widget is created in the Development environment only. |
Hierarchy at a glance
RuleCMS organizes work in nested levels:
Organization (org admin scope)
└── Team (content, media, component libraries, permissions)
├── App registry (external apps that consume published content)
└── Project
└── Environment (Development | Staging | Production)
├── Widgets (draft)
├── Collections (draft)
└── Published snapshots (Staging / Production)- Multiple organizations — a user can administer one or more orgs and belong to teams across orgs. Org admins create additional teams from the org administration area.
- Multiple teams per org — each team is isolated: its own members, user groups, widgets, collections, media, and component libraries.
- Images and component libraries are team-scoped — they are stored and permissioned at the team level, not the org or environment level. See Media Assets and Component Libraries.
- Widgets and collections are environment-scoped — draft content lives in a specific environment (usually Development). Publishing copies snapshots to Staging or Production.
Where to go next
- Organizations & Teams — invite colleagues, manage org admins, assign user groups, create additional teams.
- Widgets and The Composer — start building content.
- Publishing — ship content to staging and production.