Introduction

What ZevContent is, what it is not, and the one decision you make before anything else.

ZevContent is a headless content backend. You describe the shape of your content, people who are not developers fill it in, and your frontend reads it over a REST API.

Headless means we have no opinion about your frontend. There is no theme, no template language and no renderer — we serve JSON, and what you build with it is entirely yours. If you are looking for something that produces a website, this is the wrong tool.

The one decision: your own type, or a built-in module

Everything in ZevContent is one of two things, and knowing which you need is most of the setup.

Custom content types are shapes you define. A team-member with a name, a role and a photo. A pricing-tier with a price and a feature list. A homepage singleton with a headline. You choose the fields, we store and serve them, and the response shape follows your definition exactly.

Built-in modules are content types we define, document and maintain. There are three: a blog, a knowledge base, and the shared author directory both of them credit. You create nothing first — every project has these endpoints from the moment it exists, and they serve an empty list until somebody writes something.

What you get without asking

Because a built-in module has a schema we control, it can do work for you that a custom type cannot:

• SEO arrives resolved. seo.title falls back to the article title, seo.description to the excerpt and then to the opening of the body, seo.og_image to the featured image. You render what you are given. See SEO.
• References arrive as objects. A listing carries the resolved author and category, not author_id and category_id, so twenty article cards cost one request rather than twenty-one.
• Derived figures are computed. reading_time_minutes, word_count, and the knowledge base’s freshness verdict.

What it is not

• It is not a page builder. There are no layouts, sections or blocks that render themselves.
• It does not host your images. Media goes to your object storage, and bytes never pass through us — see Media.
• It is not a database. The query surface is deliberately bounded: filters are ANDed, there is no OR and no nesting. A query that needs those is describing a report, not a page.

Where to go next

If you have a key, the fastest path is the quickstart — three curl commands and you have read real content.

If you are an AI agent, or you are pointing one at this API, read For AI agents first. The short version: call /v1/introspection before you read anything here, because it describes your project rather than the product in general.

Updated at, Wednesday, September 2, 2026