Authoring

Evolve’s authoring layer adds an AI-driven content editor on top of your storefront. Editors open a chat panel inside the live site, ask for a page or a change, and the AI emits structured page data that renders inline through the same components shoppers see. When the editor is happy, one click writes the result back to your CMS.

The authoring layer ships as five @evolve-framework/* packages you add to your Evolve project. It is opt-in: storefronts that don’t install it look and behave exactly like a regular Evolve site.

What you get

Conversational page authoring: editors describe what they want and the AI builds a page (or edits an existing one). Output is structured page data, not raw markup, so the storefront renders it with the same components it uses for live traffic.
Inline editing: text and image fields on the rendered page become directly editable, with overlays that show which block the cursor is in.
Library reuse: AI tools search your commerce catalog and your CMS library so generated pages compose existing entries, brand assets, and real SKUs instead of inventing strings.
Image and video generation: when nothing in the library fits, the AI calls a provider (OpenAI, Google, fal) to produce an asset. Bytes stay client-side until the editor pushes, so you never pay for storage on rejected drafts.
Headless tool surface: the same AI tools the chat panel uses are also served over the Model Context Protocol, so external agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, custom AI clients) can drive content creation through the same gateway, same auth, and same persisted queries as the in-browser chrome.
Headless workflows (optional addon): long-running content jobs (campaign hubs, bulk page generation) run as background flows triggered by API or MCP, landing drafts in your CMS for editorial review. See Workflows.
Push to CMS: one click writes the full page tree (entries plus assets) through the federation gateway to your CMS in the shape your storefront’s SSR expects.

How it fits

graph LR
    Editor[Editor in browser] --> Chrome[Chrome UI<br/>authoring-chrome]
    Headless["Headless AI clients<br/>Claude Desktop, Cursor, agents"] --> MCP
    Chrome --> Server[Authoring server<br/>authoring-server]
    MCP["/mcp endpoint"] --> Server
    Server --> AI[AI providers<br/>authoring-ai-providers]
    Server --> Gateway[GraphQL gateway]
    Gateway --> CMS[CMS subgraph]
    Workflows[Workflows addon<br/>authoring-workflows<br/>optional] -. opt-in .-> Server
    Workflows --> CMS

The chrome is a React UI that overlays the live storefront. It calls the authoring server for chat, library reads, and pushes. The server delegates AI work to the providers package and writes to the CMS through your existing federation gateway: same auth, same schema, same routing as your storefront’s reads. The CMS half of the stack is ContentfulAuthoringModule (from @evolve-framework/contentful/authoring, composed into your CMS service via CompositeModule), and the gateway forwards the editor’s CMS token through the authoring_token router plugin. See the installation guide for the wiring.

The MCP endpoint is opt-in but recommended: it lets headless clients drive the same tool surface as the chat panel, with tools generated from a project-owned GraphQL operations file via @evolve-framework/mcp-core codegen.

Workflows are a fully separate optional addon, mounted on the same Fastify host as the server via mountWorkflows(app, opts) for headless content runs. Standard installs do not need it.

Setting it up

The authoring layer is installed and configured as part of working with Evolve:

Getting started: install the packages and wire up your first editor session in about ten minutes.
Installation guide: the full installation for an existing Evolve project (CMS service, authoring service, gateway, and storefront).
Packages: what each @evolve-framework/* package does and when you need it.
MCP endpoint: expose the AI tools to headless clients through @evolve-framework/mcp-core codegen.
Workflows (optional): the addon for long-running, headless content jobs.