What Thallo is

Thallo is a self-hosted CMS you install with Composer: one package that brings an admin at /admin, a visual page builder, a theme layer of Twig templates that renders the site, and a JSON API over the same content. It is built for developers making content-rich sites and storefronts, on the Glueful PHP framework, with a Vue 3 admin. This page says what a Thallo site is made of and what is switched on the day you install it.

Pages and JSON come from the same entries#

Thallo is hybrid: one entry is both a rendered page and an API resource. Nothing is copied between the two and nothing is exported. The published version of an entry is read once, and the theme's templates turn it into HTML at /{type}/{slug} while the delivery API returns the same shape as JSON at /v1/content/{type}/{slug}. The SEO object the API carries is the object the rendered page's head is built from. A content type can be mounted at root, and the starter Pages type is: its entries live at /{slug}.

One switch governs both surfaces. A content type has a Public delivery setting (Settings › Content Types). With it on, anyone may read the type's published entries, as a page and as JSON. With it off, the API answers only a request carrying an API key with read:content or read:content:{type}, and the rendered path is a 404 — there is no anonymous back door through the theme.

Rendered delivery is itself a capability. Switch it off and the install is purely headless: public paths fall through to the router's standard JSON 404, and the API is the only way out.

What a site is made of#

• Content types, entries and fields. A content type is the model an entry follows. A new install is seeded with three: Pages, Posts and Categories.
• Blocks and block types. A page's body is an ordered list of blocks stored as data, never as HTML. See blocks and block types.
• The Design view. The visual page builder: the stage shows the real page, rendered by the theme, and every edit is an operation on the page's data. See the Design view.
• A theme. themes/{name}/ with theme.json, Twig templates and assets. The site's owner changes colours, typefaces and logos under Site › Appearance without editing a template. See themes.
• Regions and menus. The header and the footer are edited under Site › Header & footer; menus are data, served to the theme and over the API.

What is switched on when you install#

A fresh install has the CMS active: content and rendered delivery, data collections, navigation, SEO, analytics, the approval workflow, storefront accounts, content importers and workspace subscriptions billing, alongside the framework extensions for media, languages, users and roles, the audit log and import/export.

Three things ship installed but not switched on:

• Content search is off. Turn it on under Settings › General, then build the index.
• Commerce and Payvia (payments) are installed and disabled. Enable them from Extensions, then run the migrations they bring.
• Meilisearch is installed and disabled. Content search does not need it: it runs on the PostgreSQL database the site already has.

Workspaces — several sites on one install — are not a plain toggle. They are turned on by their own flow under Settings › Workspaces, and the generic extension switch refuses the tenancy provider by design.

Switching a capability off does not uninstall it. The code and its tables stay; its routes, menus and blocks go. Extensions › Capabilities is where the switches are, and capabilities and packs explains what switching one on asks of you: a migration, a setting, a command or a cron line.

A Developer Preview#

Thallo is is in a Developer Preview. The packaging, the documentation and the defaults are young, and the boundaries are deliberate rather than accidental: one merchant account per installation, placed orders that cannot be edited, PostgreSQL as the only tested database. Read known limitations before you build on it, and before you take real money.

Next#

Install Thallo, then build a page.