Volto Hydra Documentation

A Visual Headless CMS using Plone as a server, providing true visual editing with drag-and-drop blocks and editable text — with any frontend stack you choose.

Why Hydra?

  • Visual + True Headless + Open Source — a unique combination in the CMS space
  • Framework agnostic — Next.js, Nuxt.js, Astro, plus server-only stacks (PHP, Django, Rails, Laravel) via the server-render pattern
  • Quick visual editing — enable it with simple HTML data attributes, no React or Vue required in your frontend
  • Omni-channel — switch between multiple frontends mid-edit
  • Enterprise features — versioning, i18n, workflow, and automated content rules
  • Customisable — both the admin interface and block definitions are fully configurable

Try the online demo

The fastest way to feel what Hydra does is to log into the hosted demo and edit a real page against a real frontend.

Open <https://hydra.pretagov.com>, log in, then:

  • Open user preferences (bottom-left).
  • Pick one of the preset frontends, or paste in your own frontend URL.
  • Edit any page — every change updates the live preview.

The default preset is a Nuxt.js frontend deployed as an SSG to demonstrate scale-to-zero editing on free hosting. An Astro example demonstrates the server-render pattern for static-first frameworks. See Build a frontend › Deployment patterns.

To run Hydra locally against your own frontend, see the Run Locally section of the project README.

Examples

Block reference: schema, JSON, and rendered examples for every block type Volto Hydra ships.

Image

The image block allows images to be embedded in various display formats. Images can be displayed in different sizes (100%, L, M, S) and aligned left, right or center of the text flow.

container-convert.png

Templates and layouts

A template is a piece of pre-built page structure that someone (often a developer or site admin) has saved separately. When you apply a template to a page, the page gets the template's structure overlaid: some blocks are fixed and can't be edited, some can be edited but not moved, and some are open slots where you fill in your own blocks.

Link

The Link content type can be used to display links on the page. Users are automatically redirected to the external site when they click on the link.

Images

Documentation screenshots referenced by editor-experience pages.