# How Lettern works

> The handful of ideas everything in Lettern is built on. Five minutes to read, and the rest of the docs will make sense.

You don't need to know any of this to edit a page. But once these few ideas click, everything else in Lettern will feel obvious.

## Pages are made of blocks

Everything you see on a page is a **block**: a heading, a paragraph, an image, a button, a row of columns. Blocks can hold other blocks, so a section can hold columns, and each column can hold text and a picture.

You build pages by adding, moving and styling blocks, right on the page. See [Writing](https://docs.lettern.org/editing/writing).

## A template frames every page

Most pages share a header, a footer and a layout. That frame is a **template**. It has a spot called _Page content_ where each page's own blocks go.

Change the template, and every page that uses it changes. Templates are made of blocks too, so you design them the same way. See [Templates](https://docs.lettern.org/design/templates).

## Components are designs you reuse

A **component** is a piece of design you use in many places: a header, a card, a call to action. Edit it once, and every copy updates. See [Components](https://docs.lettern.org/design/components).

## The design system keeps it all consistent

Your colors, fonts and spacing live in one place: the **design system**. Blocks use its values instead of fixed ones, so changing your main color restyles the whole site at once. See [Design system](https://docs.lettern.org/design/design-system).

## Content lives in collections

Pages are one kind of content. Most sites have others: blog posts, team members, projects, products. Each kind is a **collection**, and you decide which fields it has. Every item in it, each post or each dish, is an **entry**.

Your pages then show those entries in your design: the latest posts on the home page, the full menu on the menu page. Editors only fill in the fields, and the design takes care of itself. See [Collections](https://docs.lettern.org/content/collections).

## Publishing turns it into a website

When you publish, Lettern writes each page as a plain HTML file. Visitors get those files directly, which makes your site fast, cheap to host and hard to break. Forms and other live features still work. See [Publishing](https://docs.lettern.org/operations/publishing).

## People and AI use the same actions

Everything you can do in Lettern, like creating a page, uploading an image or publishing, is a named action called an **ability**. The admin uses them. So do the built-in assistant, AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, the API and the command line.

That's why AI is safe to use here: an agent can only do what the person behind it is allowed to, and everything it does is logged. See [AI and automation](https://docs.lettern.org/agents).

## Everything else is a plugin

The page builder, forms, SEO, email and the assistant are all **plugins**. Turn off what you don't need, add what you do from the store. Developers can write their own, with the same tools Lettern's own features use. See [Plugins](https://docs.lettern.org/plugins).

## Your site is a folder of files

Settings and content can be stored as plain text files, so a developer can keep the whole site in git, review changes and roll them back. You never have to touch them, but they're there. See [Project structure](https://docs.lettern.org/reference/project-structure).

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Source: https://docs.lettern.org/getting-started/how-it-works