Getting Started
From first login to a page on your staging site in about fifteen minutes. This guide assumes your RIFT instance is already provisioned and you have an admin account.
1. Sign in
RIFT uses email and password authentication. If an administrator created your account, you'll be required to set a new password on first login. Accounts without a password are locked until an admin issues one.
2. Create a site
A site is one published website: it has its own git repository, its own domains, and its own design system assignment. From Sites → New Site, you'll set:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Slug | Internal identifier, lowercase and hyphenated. |
| Production domain | Where the main branch is served (e.g. www.example.gov). |
| Staging domain | Where the staging branch is served for preview. |
| Git repository | The GitHub repo RIFT publishes rendered HTML into. Configured under site settings — see Publishing & Git. |
3. Add folders
Folders are your URL structure — a page in guides/setup publishes at /guides/setup/<file-name>. There is no separate routing layer to configure: organize the folder tree the way you want the site's paths to look.
Each folder can also enable a left navigation, which automatically lists every page in that folder on every page in that folder. This documentation section uses exactly that feature.
4. Write your first page
Create a content item inside a folder. Three fields matter most:
- Page title — used in the browser tab, navigation, and search.
- File name — the last URL segment. A file name of
indexmakes the page the folder's landing page. - Body — raw HTML. RIFT does not sanitize, escape, or rewrite your markup; what you write is what ships. Design-system components drop in via reference syntax — see Writing Content & References.
No WYSIWYG — on purpose
RIFT is built for people who write their own HTML or generate it with AI tools. If you need a drag-and-drop page builder, RIFT is honestly not your CMS.
5. Publish to staging
New items start in the draft state. Move a draft to staging, then publish: RIFT renders your page against the site's active design system, commits the static HTML to the staging branch of your site repo, and your staging host (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages…) deploys it. When it looks right, promote to public and publish to production the same way.
Every publish is a git commit with a full audit trail — there is no deploy you can't trace, and no CMS outage that can take your published site down.
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