Collections and items

Your site's content is organised into collections, and each collection holds items. The blog is a collection and each post is an item. A testimonials collection holds one item per testimonial.

Each collection has its own fields

A collection defines the fields its items have. A blog post has a title, a body, a description, an author and tags. A testimonial might have a quote, a name and a rating. The fields come from your site itself, so the Content tab's editor shows exactly what that collection needs.

You don't design these fields in a form. They are part of the site Willo built, and they change when the site changes.

Items with pages, items without

Some collections give each item its own page:

Routed collections, like the blog, give every item an address such as /blog/autumn-hours. When you create the item, the editor shows the address it will have.
Page-less collections, like testimonials or FAQs, have no address per item. Their items appear wherever the site shows that collection, for example a row of testimonials on the home page.

A routed item's address comes from its slug, which is set when the item is created and never changes after. Renaming the post later keeps the old address, so links and search results keep working. If a slug is already taken, Willo adds a number to the end.

Adding a new kind of content

To add a collection, ask Willo in chat: "add a case studies section", "I want an FAQ page", "add a recipes collection with a page for each recipe".

Willo builds the collection into the site (its fields, the section that shows it and any pages) and writes the first entries in the same request, so the section goes live with real content. Once that change deploys, the collection appears in the Content tab with its own editor, and its first entries are already there.

There is a short gap: the collection shows up after the site's deploy finishes, not the moment Willo replies. The guide Add a new collection walks through it.

If a collection is later removed from the site, its items are kept. They come back if the collection does.

The Content tab and the site's code

Willo's content manager is the source of truth for items. When you publish, the item is written into the site's code and the site rebuilds.

Content can also reach the site another way, for example when Willo edits a page's text directly or a teammate edits the code. Sync from site in the Content tab pulls those changes in, and it reports how many items it found or changed. Publishing afterwards keeps those edits rather than reverting them.