The drawer

Inline editing covers text on the page. For structured, back-office work — lists you reorder, records you create, media you manage — Louise gives you a drawer: a SolidJS overlay summoned in edit mode and rendered over the live site under the editor theme.

As of louisecms@0.3.0 the drawer is a package-provided shell, not a pattern you hand-assemble. You call mountDrawer with a config, and the shell renders the chrome, the fixed framework panels, and your registered collection tabs. It pairs with the louisecms/editor handlers on the server, which back the framework panels.

Mounting

The drawer opens from the edit bar’s Settings button, which dispatches the louise:open-drawer event mountLouise fires. Mount both in your edit-mode entry point:

import { mountLouise } from "louisecms/client";
import { mountDrawer, OPEN_DRAWER_EVENT } from "louisecms/client/drawer";
import { ProductsPanel } from "./products-panel";
import { InquiriesPanel } from "louisecms/client/drawer";

export function mountEditMode(userName: string) {
  mountDrawer({
    userName,
    // Bottom group — your own collections, registered as tabs.
    tabs: [
      { id: "products", label: "Products", panel: () => <ProductsPanel /> },
      { id: "inquiries", label: "Inquiries", panel: () => <InquiriesPanel /> },
    ],
  });
  mountLouise({
    onOpenDrawer: () => window.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent(OPEN_DRAWER_EVENT)),
  });
}

mountDrawer injects the shared stylesheet, creates one QueryClient for every panel, applies data-theme="louise" to its root (so the chrome never inherits the site’s theme), and is idempotent under Astro view-transition re-runs.

Two groups

The layout has a first-class split, encoded in the config type so a site can’t collapse it:

• Top strip — fixed framework panels. Pages, Media, and Settings, rendered as icon buttons. These are near-identical on every Louise site, so the shell owns them; you don’t register or reorder them. They talk to the generic louisecms/editor endpoints (/api/louise/pages, /api/louise/media, /api/louise/settings).
• Bottom tabs — your collections. Everything whose shape and display vary per site: your bespoke record types, registered as CollectionTabs via tabs.

Inquiries is a Louise base table, but how a submission is shown varies too much to fix in the shell — so it ships as a registerable tab (the default InquiriesPanel, customizable via renderRow), not a fixed framework panel. Add it to tabs like any other collection.

Extending Settings

The Settings panel is framework-owned, but its contents are the common base (mapped 1:1 to siteSettingsColumns — identity, appearance, navigation, contact, SEO) plus your additions. Declare extra fields with settingsExtension; they render in the same panel and persist to the site_settings.custom JSON via the settings handler’s site-declared keys:

mountDrawer({
  userName,
  settingsExtension: [
    {
      title: "Coffee",
      fields: [
        { key: "roastNote", label: "Default roast note" },
        { key: "showClub", label: "Show the club banner", type: "toggle" },
      ],
    },
  ],
  // Escape hatch for bespoke sections that self-persist (e.g. passkey enrollment).
  settingsExtras: () => <PasskeySection />,
});

Field type is one of text (default), textarea, color, toggle, image (with a media-library picker), or links (a label/href list editor); for anything else, give a field a render function. A key you didn’t declare is ignored server-side — never written — because the handler’s allowlist is authoritative.

A site whose settings don’t map to siteSettingsColumns (and keeps its own storage + settings route) can replace the framework base groups entirely with settingsBaseGroups — pass [] to show none, so only your settingsExtension fields render:

mountDrawer({
  userName,
  settingsBaseGroups: [], // hide the framework base fields this site doesn't use
  settingsExtension: [/* the site's own settings groups */],
});

Building a collection panel

A CollectionTab’s panel is any Solid component. Reuse the drawer’s data layer and the shared field primitives so your panels match the framework ones:

import { useQuery } from "@tanstack/solid-query";
import { apiGet, louiseQueryKey, Section } from "louisecms/client/drawer";
import { Icon, RichText } from "louisecms/client";

function ProductsPanel() {
  const query = useQuery(() => ({
    queryKey: louiseQueryKey("products"),
    queryFn: () => apiGet<{ products: Product[] }>("/api/louise/products"),
  }));
  // …render your list, reusing Icon / RichText / Section / the louise-* classes.
}

Icon renders the same Phosphor set as the toolbar, and RichText is the exact editor inline fields use — so a drawer form and an inline field edit prose identically. See the client reference for the full export list.

Built-in pages

If your site has code-defined routes (Home, About…) that aren’t pages rows but belong in the Pages panel list, pass them as builtInPages — each gets an “Edit on page” deep link into inline edit mode:

mountDrawer({
  userName,
  builtInPages: [
    { key: "home", title: "Home", path: "/" },
    { key: "about", title: "About", path: "/about" },
  ],
});