How It Works

Imagine running a clothing shop on WEEGLOO. You add products, upload photos, work alongside colleagues, and in the end your customers see those products on your shop's website. Once you know where all of this happens, and the path your work takes before it reaches a customer, the rest of the features fall into place.

This page does not cover individual features. Instead it walks through two big-picture views of WEEGLOO as a whole. One is how the space you work in is divided into layers (your account, the Organization, and the Space), and the other is how what you create reaches your customers (the content studio and external publishing).

The three layers: account, Organization, Space

The space you work in on WEEGLOO is made up of three layers. Using the clothing shop as an analogy, it looks like this.

Account (you)  →  Organization (the company)  →  Space (a department office)  →  content (products, photos)

• Your account is you as an individual. It is one person who logs in with an email and password.
• The Organization is the top-level unit that corresponds to the company as a whole. It groups and oversees several workspaces.
• The Space is a department office inside that company. It is the workspace where the actual products, photos, and settings live.
• Content is the things you create inside that office, such as products and photos.

First, you log in with your personal account. This account is a single person, not a company. Just as one person can belong to several companies, you can use a single account to join and work in several Organizations.

An Organization is the company-level unit where those accounts come together to work. The company that runs the clothing shop is one Organization. Billing plans are also set at this Organization level.

A Space is the actual workspace inside an Organization. Just as the clothing-shop company can keep a separate Space for its online store and another Space for internal announcements, one Organization oversees several Spaces. Conversely, every Space must belong to exactly one Organization.

And content such as products, photos, and articles is always created and lives inside one particular Space. A tumbler product created in the online-store Space exists only within that Space and does not appear in the internal-announcements Space. A Space acts as a partition that keeps content from mixing together.

To sum up: a person logs in with an account, becomes a member of some Organization, and is then assigned to a Space inside that Organization to work. Content is held inside that Space.

Organization and Space: two levels of membership

In this three-layer structure, how far a person has been brought in is split into two levels. This distinction is the starting point for "who can do what" in WEEGLOO.

First, a person becomes a member of an Organization. This is like being registered as an employee at a company. Since you cannot join an Organization on your own, someone already inside has to invite a new member by email before they can join.

Next, that member is separately assigned to the Space they will work in. This is like an employee being posted to a specific department office. Being an Organization member does not automatically put you into every Space. To let someone work with the products in the online-store Space, you have to assign them to that Space specifically.

Each of these two positions carries a permission level. The Organization position has three roles, Owner, Admin, and Member, and the Space position carries its own role that defines what you can do within that workspace. The specific steps for inviting people and setting roles are covered in Organization and Space. Here you only need the big-picture flow: you log in with an account, become an Organization member, and are then assigned to a Space.

The content studio and external publishing: two places

Now for the second big-picture view. Between creating content inside a Space and that content reaching a customer, there are two places.

• The content studio: the management screen where you and your colleagues in the same Space work. Creating products, editing them, and uploading photos all happen here. The content studio shows both content you are still working on and content you have published.
• External publishing (delivery): the place that shows content to visitors, like the actual online-store website. Only published content is delivered here.

If you only create a tumbler product in the content studio, it appears in the content studio but does not yet go up to the external publishing place. You have to publish it once more before it is finally delivered to customers. So working in the content studio does not immediately show up on the site.

To use an analogy, the content studio is the back-room workshop of a shop, and the external publishing place is the display window that customers see. Even after you finish preparing a product in the workshop, you have to take one more action to put it in the display window before customers can see it.

Drawn as a flow, it looks like this.

Create in the content studio  →  publish  →  external publishing (delivery)  →  visitor

The same applies when you edit a product you have already published. Even if you fix the price in the content studio and save, the most recently published price keeps being delivered to customers until you publish again. The states content can have, and what publishing changes, are covered in detail in States and Publishing.

These two places are separate for each Space. A product published in the online-store Space is delivered to the online-store site and does not mix with the external publishing place of the internal-announcements Space.

The whole thing as one flow

If you stitch the two views so far together into a single clothing shop, you get the full flow of using WEEGLOO.

1. Log in with your personal account.
2. Become an Organization member of the clothing-shop company. (Through an invitation.)
3. Get assigned to the online-store Space inside it and enter the workspace.
4. In the content studio, create the "Stainless Tumbler 500ml" product and upload a main photo.
5. Publish the product so it is delivered to the external publishing place, where customers see it on the online-store site.

What to do next

• Organization and Space: covers how to invite colleagues to an Organization and assign them to a Space, and the differences between the Owner, Admin, and Member roles.
• Content Modeling: covers what items content such as products is made up of inside a Space, and how to define that structure.
• States and Publishing: covers the flow of publishing content created in the content studio so it is visible externally, and the states content can have.