CMS Overview
What the PanelWave CMS is, how the app is organized, and the typical workflow from a blank work to a published interactive graphic novel.
The PanelWave CMS is the authoring environment for interactive graphic novels. You create a work, build its chapters, pages, and panels in a visual editor, wire panels together in a navigation graph, translate it, and publish it as a PanelWave manifest that the PanelWave Player renders for readers.
The CMS embeds the open-source player for previews, so what you see in Preview is exactly what readers get.
The CMS is currently in beta at app.panelwave.org — the small beta tag next to the PanelWave CMS wordmark says so. Places in the beta are given out through the Founding Creators programme.
A large 4K screen is needed for efficient work with the PanelWave CMS. The editor puts the structure tree, canvas, inspector, and timeline on screen at the same time, and page layouts are authored at print and 4K output resolutions — on a small or low-resolution display you will spend most of your time zooming and scrolling. We recommend a monitor of 27″ or larger at 3840×2160 (4K). Laptop screens are fine for reviewing, localization, and Backstage tools, but not for day-to-day authoring.
The main areas of the app
After signing in you land on My Works — everything else is reached from there.
My Works
The home screen at /works. Browse, search, and filter all your works, create new ones with the Create New Work wizard, import existing manifests, manage statuses, and open the Trash. See Works.
The Editor
Opening a work takes you to the visual editor, arranged in four zones:
- Left sidebar with three tabs: Tree (the structure of chapters, pages, and panels), Assets (your media library), and Tools.
- Canvas in the center, where you arrange artwork layers, speech bubbles, and hotspots on the selected panel or page.
- Inspector on the right with Panel, Layer, Hotspot, Speech, and A11y tabs for editing the selected element's properties, plus a Perf tab that estimates what readers download for the open panel or page.
- Timeline at the bottom for animations and audio tracks.
The editor header shows the save status (auto-save is enabled), undo/redo, a locale switcher, global search (Cmd/Ctrl+K), Work Properties, Preview, Preflight, and Publish. See Editor Layout.
Backstage
Every work also has a Backstage area — a set of management tools that sit outside the panel-by-panel editor. The Backstage sidebar ("Backstage Tools") links to:
| Tool | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Editor | Back to the visual editor |
| Characters | Your cast, portraits, and per-character balloon styles — Characters |
| Extras | Bonus content such as covers, bonus art, interviews — Extras |
| Graph Editor | The branching navigation graph between panels — Graph |
| Variables | The story's declared state (types, scopes, defaults) — Variables & Conditions |
| Preview | The embedded player — Preview |
| Paywall | Monetization rules — Monetization |
| Entitlement | Simulate what a reader with/without purchases sees |
| Localization | The translation workshop — Localization |
| Audio | Per-locale voice audio and text-to-speech |
| Validation | Preflight checks before publishing — Validation |
| Analytics | Reader metrics — Analytics |
Account, Team, and Profile
The user menu (top right, on every screen) leads to Profile, Exports (your export jobs — see Export), and Team, plus theme and font toggles, keyboard shortcuts, a Documentation link to this site, and logout. See Account & Team.
AI assistants
Everything above can also be done by an AI assistant working with you. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other assistants connect to PanelWave's MCP server at https://mcp.panelwave.org/mcp and can:
- create a complete work from a script or outline — chapters, pages, panels, characters and speech balloons;
- upload artwork, attach it to the right panels and fit each panel to its image on every page format;
- letter panels, edit layers, hotspots, variables and the story graph, rename characters, reorder structure;
- add languages, machine-translate and review, run Preflight with its automatic fixes, publish a preview or a release.
The assistant works as you, with your team role, plan limits and the permissions you grant. It asks before destructive steps, and you connect, review and disconnect assistants under Profile → Connected apps & access tokens. See AI Assistants (MCP) and the tool reference.
Most screens also carry a small help icon at the top right of their title — click it to open the page of this documentation that describes the screen you are on, in a new tab.
From idea to published work
- Create a work with the 3-step wizard — title, URL slug, languages, age rating, and tags. Optionally start from a template. See Works.
- Upload your artwork (and audio, video, fonts) into the Assets library. Files are processed automatically into optimized variants. See Assets.
- Build the structure: add chapters, pages, and panels in the Tree tab, then compose each panel from layers on the canvas. See Pages & Panels and Layers.
- Add dialogue and interactivity: speech bubbles (with character styling), hotspots, animations, and audio.
- Connect the story in the Graph Editor — an entry panel plus edges, optionally with conditions for branching narratives.
- Localize text and audio for every language you support. See Localization.
- Validate with Preflight and fix any errors — errors block publishing. See Validation.
- Preview the work in the embedded player, then publish it. See Publishing for the current state of the publish flow.
New to PanelWave? Follow the step-by-step tutorial: Your First Graphic Novel.
Every step of this flow is also available to AI assistants. A typical split: the assistant turns the script into structure, letters the balloons, attaches the art and runs the checks; you review in the editor and Preview and decide what gets published.
Where your content ends up
Everything you author is stored against the open PanelWave format. Publishing produces a panelwave.json manifest plus your processed assets; you can also export works and later import them again — there is no lock-in to the CMS.