Starter kits that stand on their own
Spillway's four sector kits now describe what they are built for, and a single install gives a college, a city, a nonprofit or a staff intranet a working site with real structure.
An empty CMS is a hard place to start. Before the first page can be written someone has to decide what a program is, which fields an event needs and how news is tagged. Spillway's kits make those decisions for you, for the kinds of organizations that most often run marketing sites.
This week we went through every kit so that each one explains itself, without assuming you know where it came from.
The four sector kits
- Higher education, for colleges and universities: programs, people, events and news, with departments, degree levels and audiences, and a request-for-information form.
- City and local government, for cities and counties: the services residents look for, departments, officials, meetings, notices, projects and facilities, with forms for reporting an issue and contacting the city.
- Nonprofit: programs, impact stories, events, partners, campaigns and press, with volunteer, newsletter and contact forms.
- Intranet and portal, for staff intranets: announcements, resources, policies, a staff directory, events and help, organized by audience and department.
The fifth kit, docs, holds Spillway's own documentation. It is what powers the docs on this site.
What an install gives you
Each kit installs content types with their fields, vocabularies with terms, saved collections, forms, menus and starter pages. With Include sample content on, which is the default in the setup wizard, you also get realistic content to see the pages working before your own goes in.
When the install finishes, the Kits screen says what changed in one sentence and offers to show you the site. The full list of what was created is one click away rather than filling the dialog.
Kits seed, they do not manage
A kit installs what is missing and leaves what exists alone, so running it again never overwrites an edit made in the admin. After the install the structure is yours: change the types, rename the menus, delete what you do not need.
Kits are plain JSON, which makes them easy for people and AI agents to write. The kits guide in the docs covers the format, and you can publish your own to the registry for other Spillway sites to install.