Canvas
The Canvas shows your pages as cards on an endless whiteboard. The normal page tree is built for everyday edits. The Canvas is built for the big moves: sketching out a new section of the site, reorganizing fifty pages, or planning next quarter's structure. You do all of it visually, by dragging, and nothing touches the live site until you say so.
If you have ever restructured a website on a whiteboard or in a mind-mapping tool before typing anything into a CMS, this is that step, done in the CMS itself.
Highlight
Two things make the Canvas unusual for a CMS. Nothing you do touches real content until you press Apply, so a restructuring plan is something you can explore, discuss, and throw away. And you are not alone on the board: colleagues appear as named, coloured cursors moving in real time, the way they would in a design tool.
Nothing is real until you press Apply
This is the most important thing to understand about the Canvas, and it is what makes it safe to experiment.
Everything you do here goes into a plan that only you are working on. Creating a page, renaming one, moving one, deleting one: each change is collected and marked on the card with a small label such as Created, Edited, Moved, or Deleted. The real content is untouched the whole time.
- Apply carries out the entire plan at once and tells you how many changes were made.
- Discard, also called Reload from server, throws the plan away and shows the current real state again.
- Deleting a card marks everything underneath it as well. Those children are labelled Deleted with parent and can be rescued either by restoring the parent or by dragging them out of the deleted branch.
- Checks run on the plan before it can be applied, so problems surface while they are still cheap to fix.
Working on the board
- Move around by panning and zooming, the way you would in a map or a design tool. Pages are cards, laid out as a tree.
- Add pages either at the top level with Add top-level page, or as a child of any card. You are only offered the content types that are actually allowed in that position.
- Drag cards to move them under a different parent or to reorder a branch. Keyboard navigation works, and so do undo and redo.
- Web addresses can be generated automatically from the page name, or typed by hand per card, whichever the situation calls for.
Planning together
The Canvas is built for the conversation that usually happens in a meeting room, so it works with several people on the board at once.
- You see each other's mouse cursors, each one carrying the colleague's name in their own colour, moving live across the board. This is the same feeling as a shared whiteboard: you can literally point at a branch while talking about it.
- You see what everybody is focused on, so the card your colleague is renaming is visibly theirs.
- Structural moves are shared as they happen, so the plan on your screen is the plan on theirs.
Nothing here changes the live site either. The plan stays a plan until somebody presses Apply, which makes joint planning genuinely low-risk.
Planning with AI
If AI is switched on for your space, the assistant panel can reshape the plan from a written instruction, for example "add a five-page product section under /products with one landing page per feature".
The AI's changes appear on the board as part of your plan, exactly like the ones you made by hand, and carry the same labels. Anything it could not lay out locally is flagged for you with a shortcut that jumps to the card in question. You still review everything and press Apply yourself. The AI never commits anything on its own.
Canvas or content tree?
| What you want to do | Where to do it |
|---|---|
| Edit the fields of one page | Content editor |
| Move or rename a handful of pages | The content tree, by dragging |
| Restructure a section, plan a new area, create a lot of pages at once | Canvas |