SPEC-097
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ID:SPEC-097Status:draft

Editor config studio

refrakt.config.json has grown from a content pointer into the project's control panel — multi-site sites, a structured theme object (package, presets, per-mode token overrides, code colour scheme), named tints and backgrounds, inline-SVG icons, plugins, routeRules, entityRoutes, plus root-level plan, xrefs, and fileRoots. The editor reads and writes exactly one of these fields (routeRules), and even that has no UI. This spec gives the editor a Site Settings area with proper UX knobs for the config surface, with a raw-JSON escape hatch so the UI never blocks access to new fields.

Target: editor-focused minors; panels are independently shippable.

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Motivation

  • The only config endpoint is GET/PUT /api/route-rules (packages/editor/src/server.ts); everything else in packages/types/src/theme.ts (SiteConfig, ~20 fields) is invisible to the editor.
  • Theme tokens, tints, backgrounds, and icons are exactly the kind of visual knobs an editor should own — they're CSS-variable-backed, so live preview is nearly free, and tint/bg preset names already feed attribute autocomplete (server.ts injects them into /api/runes).
  • Route rules determine layouts per URL pattern and order matters, but authors edit them blind in JSON with no view of which pages match.
  • entityRoutes generate pages from the registry with {field} interpolation and render templates — config that authors iterate on constantly when building registry-driven sites, currently hand-written.
  • A machine-readable schema already exists (refrakt.config.schema.json), which the UI should lean on rather than hardcoding field knowledge.

Design

A "Site Settings" area in the editor (per site — see WORK-392 for site selection), organised into panels. Every panel writes back to refrakt.config.json through a new GET/PUT /api/config/site endpoint that patches only the keys the panel owns (no full-file rewrites of unrelated sections). A raw JSON editor with schema validation against refrakt.config.schema.json is always available for fields the UI doesn't model yet.

Theme panel

  • Token editor for theme.tokens — colour pickers for color.* with light and dark (theme.modes.dark) side by side; text inputs for non-colour tokens. Changes apply live to the preview iframe (tokens are CSS variables).
  • Preset selector for theme.presets (discovered from the theme package's exports) and a code.colorScheme toggle.

Tints & backgrounds panels

  • Named-preset lists with rendered swatch previews; add via extends picker over theme presets; edit token overrides inline.
  • Saving refreshes the attribute-completion preset names so the authoring side picks up new tints immediately.

Route rules panel

  • Visual ordered list: pattern input → layout picker (named layouts from packages/transform/src/layouts.ts plus plugin-contributed ones).
  • Live matched-pages preview per rule, evaluated against the content tree; flags pages shadowed by an earlier rule when patterns overlap.
  • Drag-to-reorder (first match wins).

Entity routes panel

  • Per-route form: entity type (dropdown from registry types — shared infrastructure from SPEC-096), URL pattern with {field} placeholders validated against actual entity fields, title template, render / render-template picker (file browser over the templates dir), frontmatter map.
  • Preview: a live sample of the pages the route would generate.

Icons & plugins panels

  • Icons: list of named icons with rendered previews; paste-SVG to add or edit.
  • Plugins: read-only inventory first — installed plugins with the runes, layouts, and hooks each contributes (data already available via the plugin loader). Enable/disable writes the plugins array; installing new packages is out of scope.

Acceptance Criteria

  • A Site Settings area exists with panels for theme tokens, tints, backgrounds, route rules, entity routes, icons, and plugins, plus a schema-validated raw JSON fallback.
  • GET/PUT /api/config/site reads and patches refrakt.config.json per-section without clobbering unrelated keys; external edits to the config surface through the existing change-detection flow.
  • Theme token edits (including dark-mode overrides) apply live to the preview without a server restart.
  • Tint/background preset changes refresh attribute completion in the same session.
  • Route rules render as an ordered visual list with per-rule matched-pages preview and drag-to-reorder.
  • Entity routes are editable as forms with field-validated {field} placeholders and a generated-pages preview.
  • Icons and plugins have at minimum inventory panels; icons support add/edit via pasted SVG.
  • Unknown/unmodelled config keys are preserved through any panel save.

Non-goals

  • Creating or deleting sites, or editing root-level plan / xrefs / fileRoots (raw JSON covers them; UI can come later).
  • npm-installing new plugins or themes from the editor.
  • Theme authoring (editing a theme package's own files) — this is project-level config only.

References

  • SPEC-096 — registry plumbing reused by the entity-routes panel. WORK-392 — multi-site selection prerequisite.
  • SPEC-069 — entityRoutes. ADR-014 / ADR-015 — frame presets and scale ramps in the token contract (future theme-panel knobs).
  • packages/types/src/theme.ts (SiteConfig), refrakt.config.schema.json, packages/editor/src/server.ts (route-rules endpoint to generalise), packages/transform/src/layouts.ts.