Every well-designed system has a vocabulary. Master it, and the system becomes intuitive.
The Phonemos Hierarchy
Phonemos organizes content in four levels. Each level serves a distinct purpose and carries its own configuration, permissions, and URL structure.
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Instance
└── Site (accessible via its own URL)
└── Topic (a collection of related content)
├── Page (a wiki page with rich content)
├── Page
│ └── Sub-page
└── File List (a managed collection of files)Instance
Your instance is the entirety of your Phonemos deployment — all sites, all users, and all configuration. Most organizations have a single instance. Users exist at the instance level and can be granted access to specific sites.
Site
A site is a separately addressable website within your instance. Each site has its own URL (e.g., wiki.company.com, docs.company.com), its own navigation and topic structure, its own theme, and its own permission configuration. Sites share the instance's user directory.
When to create a new site: when content needs a different URL, different branding, or a fundamentally different audience.
Topic
A topic groups related pages within a site. Topics appear in the site's main navigation. A topic might represent a project, a team, a domain, or a document collection.
When to create a new topic: when a body of content has its own logical scope and you want it to appear as a distinct section in the navigation.
Pages and File Lists
Pages are the primary content unit — rich-text documents supporting real-time collaboration, versioning, metadata, and multilingual content. Pages are organized in a page tree within their topic.
File lists give document collections their own place in the tree. Rather than burying files as page attachments, Phonemos treats file collections as first-class citizens alongside wiki pages. Files are versioned, searchable (including full-text indexing of PDFs and Word documents), and previewable in the browser.
Key Building Blocks
Labels
A label is a simple tag attached to any page. Labels are just another metadata field. Labels create cross-cutting relationships that transcend the page tree — for example, labelling pages across different topics with "onboarding" so they can all be found with one filter.
Metadata Fields
A metadata field is a typed, named property attached to a page — text, dates, dropdowns, user references, and more. Metadata fields can be embedded directly in pages as visible content elements and queried to generate filterable, sortable tables. This is the foundation for advanced use cases like document registers and risk matrices.
Synthetic Metadata
Automatically generated fields such as "last updated," "last editor," and "revision number." These require no effort from the author and are invaluable for audit trails.
Templates
Page templates provide reusable page structures (headings, metadata fields, placeholder text). Tree-structure templates create entire sub-trees in one action — for example, a "New Project" template that generates a charter, decisions log, meetings folder, and deliverables folder.
Zones
A zone is a protected folder within a topic. Zones serve two purposes: access control (restricting who can view or edit pages inside the zone) and metadata domain (defining a metadata schema specific to pages in that zone).
Editing, Drafts, and Publishing
Every time you open a page for editing, Phonemos automatically creates a draft version in the background. All changes are saved continuously — there is no "save" button you need to remember to press. If you navigate away or lose your connection, the draft is retained.
What happens when you finish editing depends on the publishing workflow configured for the topic. Topic managers choose one of three modes:
Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
No Publishing Workflow | Hitting Save creates a new version and publishes it immediately. Visitors see the update right away. This is the default. |
Drafts Allowed | Authors can choose between Save as Draft (keeps changes private) and Save & Publish (creates a new version visible to visitors). The draft option is a convenience — a way to explicitly park unfinished work before making it public. |
Explicit Publishing | Only Save as Draft is available. Drafts are versioned but remain invisible to readers. Publishing is a separate step that can only be performed on the newest draft version. In multilingual topics, Phonemos shows the draft state of each language version before confirming — allowing you to review which translations are ready before proceeding. |
In all three modes, every saved version is retained in the version history. You can view, compare, or restore any previous version from the sidebar.
Permissions at a Glance
Permissions in Phonemos follow a layered model:
Level | Controls |
|---|---|
Instance | Who can log in, which authentication methods are available |
Site | Who can access each site, and in what role |
Topic | Who can view, edit, or manage each topic |
Zone | Who can access protected areas within a topic |
Permissions are assigned through roles (predefined or custom) and groups (collections of users). Roles define what actions are allowed; groups define who holds each role.