Core concepts
PhiWebs is built on a small number of concepts that nest inside one another. Start at the top — an app is what a customer gets; everything below it is a part of one.
- Apps — What you get: pages, data, visitor sign-in and appearance, delivered together and published at their own address.
- Surfaces — One page inside an app: a Receipt, materialised, and the unit the platform API addresses.
- Blocks — The pieces a page is composed from, and what each one is for.
- Capabilities — The powers a page declares when it needs to store, read, navigate or react.
- Composition — How blocks and capabilities combine into a surface, and where appearance lives.
- Receipts — The line-numbered proposal PhiCo makes and you accept before anything ships.
- PhiCo — The composer that reads your brief and proposes those Receipts.
- Starters — Pre-composed surfaces to begin from instead of an empty page.
Vocabulary at a glance
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| App | What a customer gets and owns: surfaces, records, visitor sign-in and appearance as one publishable whole. |
| World | The workspace an account’s apps live in — team, plan, storage, entitlements. |
| Surface | A page inside an app: a receipt-materialised composition. Reproducible, versioned, capability-bound. |
| Receipt | The line-numbered proposal for a change. What PhiCo shows you before it lands. |
| Block | One typed piece of a page — a heading, a form, a table, a gallery. |
| Capability | A power a surface declares (platform/persistence, platform/entities, platform/navigation, platform/interaction). |
| Records | The data an app keeps. They belong to the app that wrote them, not to the World at large. |
| PhiCo | The composer that proposes Receipts. |
| pwpack | Your app’s full source in one package — the download that makes it portable. |
| pwapp | A ready-to-run export of an app for any static host. |
| Φ | The unit that meters building and AI. See Billing & plans. |