How Atlas works

Organizations, sites, environments, the site contract, publishing and delivery in one page.

The building blocks

Concept	What it is
Organization	Your company. It owns sites, people and its plan.
Site	One website. Content, media, people’s access and settings never cross between sites.
Environment	Each site has Development and Production. You work in Development; Production serves only an approved release.
Site contract	A JSON description of your website: its components and their typed fields, page types, collections, header/footer globals, media profiles and design tokens.
Page	A route on your website (for example `/about`), made of sections. Each section is one of your contract’s components, with its field values.
Entry	One item in a collection, such as a product or a news article.
Global	Content shared across pages, such as the site header and footer.
Delivery token	A server-only token your website uses to read published content for one environment.

How content reaches your website

 Editor in Studio ──draft──▶ Atlas (Development) ──publish──▶ published revision
                                                                     │
                       your website server ◀── Delivery API (HTTPS, delivery token)
                               │
                       your components render it ──▶ visitors

Your developers describe the website in the site contract. A site admin activates it in Studio.
Editors create and change pages and entries as drafts. Drafts never appear on the public website.
Editors preview a draft inside your real website design, then publish. Every publish is an immutable revision, so you can roll back.
Your website reads published content from the Delivery API with its delivery token, from server code only.
Atlas sends a signed webhook on publish, so your website refreshes just the affected pages.

Development and Production

Every new site starts in Development. Content is edited and published there.
Production is off until a site admin switches it on, after a release has passed all checks and a person with approval rights has approved it.
Production serves only its live, signed release: a frozen snapshot of approved content. Editing Development never changes Production until the next approved release.
Switching the environment in Studio only changes what you are looking at. It never changes content.

More: Development and Production.

What your website must do

Atlas does not run on your website. Your developers add a small amount of code:

a server-only client for the Delivery API;
rendering of sections through your existing components;
a fallback: if Atlas is unreachable or has nothing published for a page, the site serves its built-in content;
a draft preview route, a webhook receiver and a build report.

The connection guide walks through each one.