Own the Publication

Most writing about publishing systems is about the pages. This is about the press.

The site you are reading is not a theme installed on a platform. It is a small publishing system I built and run: a headless front end that renders the public pages, a content management application that runs on my own machine, and a set of modules — articles, books, decks, media, taxonomy, discovery, protection — that each do one job and hand off cleanly to the next.

This book walks through all of it. Every module gets a chapter, most chapters get screenshots, and the whole thing is written for someone who wants to understand the shape of the system rather than read its source.

What this book is not. It does not document internal mechanics — how the credentials are held, how the editing surface talks to itself, how any of the security is implemented. Those are deliberately absent. What you get instead is the architecture, the modules, the reasoning behind the choices, and what each part actually looks like in use.

A note on the order. The first three chapters set up the shape of the system — why a press at all, what “headless in front” means here, and where the content actually lives. Everything after that is a module. You can read them in order or jump to the one you care about.