Workbench
Contents
The Workbench is the application shell of Content Studio. It has three parts: a project bar across the top, a menu bar on the left, and a main panel that fills the rest.
The Editor is not part of the Workbench — it opens in a separate browser tab.
Project bar
The horizontal bar across the top of the window. It carries application-wide controls that are not specific to any single menuitem:
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The project context selector on the left — switches between the projects and layers the current user has access to. Every menuitem (except Settings, see below) inherits the selected project as its context.
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An open issues indicator showing the number of unresolved issues in the current project, with a dropdown to jump into them.
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The current user’s avatar and the XP admin menu on the right.
Menu bar
The vertical strip on the left lists the available menuitems: top-level views contributed by Content Studio or by an installed application. Clicking an icon swaps the main panel to that menuitem’s view.
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Navigator — the built-in default, anchored at the top of the menu bar. The content tree, search, and per-content actions. See Navigator.
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Settings — anchored at the bottom-left, set apart from the regular menuitem stack. Unlike the others, Settings is not scoped to the currently selected project — it manages all projects and layers. See Settings.
Additional menuitems are contributed by installed applications and appear in the stack between Navigator and Settings. The two most common:
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Archive — browse, restore, and permanently delete archived content. Contributed by Content Studio+. See Archive.
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GraphQL Playground — interactive query console for the Guillotine API. Contributed by Guillotine.
Contributing a menuitem
Any installed application can add a menuitem to the menu bar. The icon and view appear when the app is installed in the current project.
See the menuitems extension reference for the descriptor format, lifecycle, and implementation details.
Main panel
The remaining space is the main panel — the surface controlled by the active menuitem. The Navigator splits it into a toolbar, search panel, content tree, Preview, and Context panel; other menuitems arrange the panel differently.
Two of those panels — Preview and Context panel — appear inside multiple menuitem views (Navigator, Archive) and also inside the Editor. Their behaviour and extension models are shared across surfaces, which is why they are documented on their own pages.