Areca DocsCMS guide
How editors and agency admins write, review, schedule and publish a client's website content in the Areca CMS.
This guide is for the people who write and manage a client's website content in the Areca CMS. You do not need technical skills to use it. You never edit the website's code. You work with forms, text and images, and Areca publishes your approved content to the live site.
Who this guide is for
Your role decides which buttons you can use. Where a button is not available to you, it is shown as disabled, usually with the reason.
- Editors write and edit drafts, upload images, add SEO details and preview their work.
- Owners do everything an editor does. They also mark entries as ready, schedule them, start Go live, archive and delete entries, and manage the people on their client's team.
- Agency admins work across every client and site. They set up clients, sites, content types, branding and AI settings.
The full list of permissions is in Roles and permissions.
The editor workflow at a glance
Content moves through four steps. Nothing reaches the live website until an owner approves it and starts a release.
Write. Create an entry or edit an existing one. Changes save automatically, and they stay in the CMS as a draft. The live website does not change.
Preview. Open the draft on the website to check how it looks before anyone else sees it.
Mark as ready. An owner approves the entry for the next release.
Go live. An owner starts a release. Every ready change on the site is published together, and the website is rebuilt and deployed.
An owner can also schedule a ready entry for a later time. The release then starts by itself at that time.
Find your guide
Finding your way around
Signing in, the sidebar and site switcher, collection lists, filters, search and the phone layout.
Writing and editing entries
Creating entries, the editor, saving, field types, slugs, deleting and archiving.
Drafts, ready and live
What each status means, who can mark an entry ready, and what happens when you edit a ready entry.
Previewing drafts
See a draft on the real website before you mark it ready.
Scheduling
Choose when an entry goes live, and change or cancel the schedule.
Going live
How owners publish the site, follow a release and roll back to an earlier one.
Library
Upload, find and describe the images and PDFs your content uses.
SEO and AI suggestions
Search, social and structured-data settings for each entry, and AI suggestions you can review.
Connect AI
Let ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or another AI app draft and update content on your site. You approve each app in your browser, and you can disconnect it at any time.
History and activity
Earlier versions of an entry, and who changed what.
Account and security
Your profile, appearance, language and two-factor sign-in.
Agency admin pages
Agency admins set up the clients and sites that editors and owners work in. These pages are for agency admins. Owners and editors can skip them.
Clients and sites
Create a client, add sites and manage them.
Site settings
The General, Deployment, Developer, AI and Content tabs for a site.
Content types
Turn content types on and off, and change their fields.
People and invitations
Invite editors and owners, and manage agency-wide access.
Deployments
Connect a site to its deployment target and health check.
Branding
Change the name, colours, logo and fonts of the CMS for your agency.
AI settings
Configure the AI models used for SEO suggestions.
MCP endpoint and tools
For developers: the endpoint, every tool an AI app can call, and the field formats.
Related
- How Areca works explains clients, sites, releases and snapshots.
- Roles and permissions lists what each role can do.
- Two-factor authentication explains the extra sign-in step that agency admins must use.