Manablox

Plugins

Take only what you need.

Manablox starts as a lean core. Four first-party plugins add the rest: a designed website, AI, workflows and webhooks. Each works on its own, and some do more together. Workflows and webhooks are MIT licensed like the core; website and AI are commercial premium plugins, free in development and with a free trial for production.

The core stays lean.

Every instance has these, with or without a plugin. Plugins are opt-in: a new instance is the core alone until you pick one, and an instance without a plugin shows nothing of it, not a feature that is there and broken.

Every core feature
  • Spaces
  • Content types
  • Content
  • Assets
  • Users and roles
  • Environments
  • Publishing
  • Approvals
  • Notifications
  • Delivery APIs

@manablox/plugin-website · Commercial license

Website Premium

A space either keeps a code frontend of its own or becomes a designed site: shaped on a live canvas in the admin and served by a site process of its own.

Paid plugin

Start free trialBuy

Free trial. Free in development: it runs without a key on private hosts. How licenses work

  • With AI: a theme and block designs drawn up from a description.
manablox plugin install website

Read the docs Read it in the story: What’s new

  • A live canvas

    Drag blocks onto the page and see every change as it will look, on desktop and on phones.

  • Themes and designs

    Start from twelve ready-made designs, then make colours, fonts, header, footer and menus your own.

  • Publish with a safety net

    Share a preview link first, publish when you are happy, go back to any earlier version.

  • Served by Manablox

    The finished site runs fast and cached, with your own domains, SEO settings and forms.

  • One process, many sites

    The site process picks the space by the domain it is called on, so one process serves every designed space.

  • A site password

    Keep a whole site behind one password while it is not ready, with nothing of it in the cache or in search engines.

  • Per space

    The choice is made space by space. Spaces that keep a code frontend are not touched by any of this.

@manablox/plugin-ai · Commercial license

AI Premium

Models you choose, keys you own, and nothing that happens without a person saying yes.

Paid plugin

Start free trialBuy

Free trial. Free in development: it runs without a key on private hosts. How licenses work

  • With workflows: an AI step on the canvas, and workflows designed from a description.
  • With the website: theme and block design.
manablox plugin install ai

Read the docs Read it in the story: Wednesday

  • Your providers

    Claude and ChatGPT for text. Google’s Nano Banana and Imagen for images, Veo for video. All with your own keys.

  • Models you host yourself

    Connect Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, LocalAI, llama.cpp or any server that speaks the OpenAI API. Several per space if you like.

  • The magic wand

    Beside every text, rich text and image field. Choose a style, a tone and a length, then edit the answer before you use it.

  • It reads the room

    The model is told the content type, the field, the language, the title and what the other fields already say.

  • Whole documents

    Generate fills every field and every block list, and lays the blocks out on the grid. You review it on the real board first.

  • Design by describing

    Describe a content model, a template or a whole new space in a sentence or two. Preview it, then create it in one go.

  • Keys kept safe

    Keys are per space, encrypted, and never sent back to the browser. Every generation is logged, keys never are.

@manablox/plugin-workflows · MIT license

Workflows

The things you would otherwise do by hand after publishing, drawn once on a canvas.

  • With AI: steps that write or draw, and a whole workflow designed from a description.
  • With webhooks: a workflow started or stopped by another system calling in.
manablox plugin install workflows

Read the docs Read it in the story: Thursday

  • A canvas of nodes

    Connect steps with lines, snap them to a grid, tidy the layout with one click. Each step can use what the ones before it produced.

  • Triggers

    Start on a change to content, or on a schedule down to cron with a timezone.

  • Steps

    Send email, call an API, reshape data, read a website, create a document, send a push notification.

  • Conditions, loops, waits

    Continue only if a rule holds, run once per item, or wait minutes to days. Waits survive a restart.

  • Drafts and versions

    What you edit is a draft. Save it without touching what runs, and publish it when it is ready.

  • Every run recorded

    See each run’s status, what every step received, and paint the result back onto the canvas.

@manablox/plugin-webhooks · MIT license

Webhooks

One system telling another that something happened. A space does both, and keeps a log of every call.

  • With workflows: a call starts every workflow pointed at it, or stops their runs.
manablox plugin install webhooks

Read the docs Read it in the story: Thursday

  • Outgoing on content events

    Call a URL of yours when content is created, updated, saved, deleted, published or unpublished, as JSON.

  • Incoming endpoints

    Give another system a URL to call. Its address never changes, even when you rename the endpoint.

  • Proving who is calling

    Signatures the way GitHub and Stripe sign theirs, tokens, passwords, or OAuth 2 on the way out. Secrets stay in the credential vault.

  • Retries and resends

    Outgoing calls retry with backoff and can be resent from the log.

  • A log of every call

    Both directions, let through or not. A call turned away for a wrong signature shows up with the reason.

Premium plugins

Website and AI need a license key in production.

Manablox is open source under the MIT license: the core, the admin, the CLI, the SDKs, the workflows and webhooks plugins, and the license plugin that checks the keys. The website and AI plugins are commercial, under their own license. They are paid by subscription, monthly or yearly, each on its own or both as a bundle, with a free trial of each plugin. On your laptop and on staging with private hosts they run without a key. In production, without a key they stay installed but locked; your data stays either way, and designed sites keep rendering.

The MIT source on GitHubPricesBuy both as a bundleLicenses in the user guide

  • One key per subscription

    A subscription holds one plugin or the bundle. An instance can hold several keys, and gets what all of them cover.

  • A seat per production instance

    Each seat of a subscription covers one public production instance. Move a key by deactivating the old instance.

  • Free in development

    Your laptop and staging on private hosts run the premium plugins without a key. A key works there too, and takes no seat.

  • Checked offline

    A signed lease is checked on the instance and refreshed once a day. When the license server cannot be reached, nothing locks for up to two weeks.

Install and remove

One list, or one command.

  1. Pick them when you create

    pnpm dlx @manablox/cli create my-cms

    create asks once, in one list with nothing ticked. --features website,ai picks exactly that list for a script, and --yes on its own gives the core.

  2. Add one later

    pnpm exec manablox plugin install ai workflows

    Adds the package, writes its part of your config, .env and compose files, installs and migrates. Restart, and it is there.

  3. Take one out

    pnpm exec manablox plugin uninstall webhooks

    Takes those parts out again. Its data stays in the database, and installing it again brings it back.

manablox plugin disable ai --space blog switches a plugin off for one space and enable back on. The ids are website, ai, workflows and webhooks. manablox license buy opens the checkout for the premium plugins and writes the key into .env.

Picking features in the docsAdding and removing them laterWriting a plugin of your own

Start lean. It installs in one line.

pnpm dlx @manablox/cli create my-cms
Installation guide