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Slate

Route/authoring/slate PreviewSlate previewslate

Slate turns a project version's catalog and content into a documentation portal — "Portal design, preview and publishing" in the suite dropdown; "Design, preview, and publish documentation portals from your catalog." on the launcher card. It is in preview.

Its product sidebar:

GroupPages
Site OverviewDashboard, Build History
Content & ThemeVisual Builder, Theme Editor, Navigation, Content Blocks
Preview & ExportPreview, Export, Version Switcher
SettingsCustom Domain, Settings

What is saved and what is local​

In this preview the design pages — the builder, theme, navigation and content blocks — render the portal locally from the version's catalog and keep your edits for the session only: their Save buttons are disabled and say so. The Export page builds a ZIP in your browser from the same catalog. What is persisted:

  • Site settings — code-sample defaults, SEO, analytics, access control and indexing — stored on the site in Spire; saving them creates the site the first time.
  • Custom domains — stored on the deployment control plane.
  • Builds and releases — recorded by the control plane and shown on the dashboard, in build history and in the Release Center. The studio does not start a build itself yet.

The visual builder​

Route/authoring/slate

The builder is three panes — "Choose a project and version to design its portal."

  • Structure — the tree of pages and blocks. "The path catalog could not be read, so the portal structure is unknown. Reload to try again."
  • Canvas — the portal rendered in a sandboxed frame at Desktop (1280, full-width), Tablet (834 × 1112, two-column) or Mobile (390 × 844, single-column); and shown as Draft, Stored, or Before / after side by side. The sandbox denies every network request.
  • Inspector (a peek drawer on narrow windows — "Properties, theme, accessibility and changes"):
    • Properties — the selected block's Kind, Heading and Body ("Markdown. Rendered escape-first in the preview, so raw HTML shows as text.")
    • Theme — Accent, Background, Text, Muted text, Font family, Base size, Corner radius, Custom CSS and Custom script, both applied inside the sandbox only
    • Accessibility (n) — findings with severity, remedy, WCAG criterion and Go to: contrast (1.4.3), missing or empty headings (2.4.6), heading order and unlabeled list items (1.3.1). "No accessibility findings." when clean; custom-CSS contrast is not measured
    • Changes (n) — theme changes and changed pages since the session started

The toolbar's Create preview, Save theme and Publish are disabled in this preview, each naming the managed preview deployment or site API it waits on; Discard changes (with a confirmation) is the one that acts. The selection, viewport, mode and tab live in the URL, so a builder link is shareable, and a link from the Authoring Overview can land on one page.