Getting started

This guide walks through the complete path to your first content on Cursiva: creating the organization, creating a content, writing it in the editor, setting access and price, reviewing it as a learner, publishing, and sharing. Each step is short enough that you can validate the entire platform in a single session.

On Cursiva, the central unit is the content. A content can be a standalone lesson, a sellable material, or a larger experience composed of other referenced contents. Everything else — publishing, access, enrollment, payment, and tracking — revolves around it.

Flow overview

The path to your first content has seven steps. Each one is reversible: nothing is visible to the learner until you publish.

Before you begin

A content always belongs to an organization, and you must be a member of it to create and edit. Confirm the organization's name, its visual identity, and who is involved in the operation. These details can be adjusted later in Settings, without blocking content creation.

If your organization works with teams, decide early whether the content will be personal (belonging to the creator) or a team's. Creating a content inside a team's portfolio requires you to be part of it — or to be an owner/admin of the organization.

Step 1 — Prepare the organization

Review the organization's identity before exposing any content to the public: name, logo, and the public slug, which forms the canonical URL of your offerings. Nothing here blocks content creation, but the organization's name appears as the publisher on public pages and in the catalog.

Step 2 — Create the content

1. Go to Content in the dashboard and create a new content.
2. Enter the content's slug (URL identifier).
3. Choose the owner: personal or a team.
4. The content starts out as an empty draft, ready for writing.

The slug is validated at creation and must be unique within the organization. The rules:

The content's internal identifier (the id) is the stable identity across the entire platform — enrollments, purchases, reviews, quiz history, and references point to it. That's why the slug can be renamed later without breaking these links; only the old public links stop resolving.

Step 3 — Write in the editor

Open the Content tab of the editor and write the first section. The editor combines free writing with structured blocks: paragraphs, headings, lists, quotes, code, and tables form the narrative; blocks come in when you need media, navigation, or interaction.

• Use headings to split the reading into understandable steps — they also define the sections that anchor the learner's progress.
• Type / to open the block menu and insert media, activities, or references.
• Write clear names from the start: they appear in the dashboard, in the catalog, and in the learner experience.

The draft is saved as you work. For the step-by-step of writing, see Editor and blocks; for the full block library, see Blocks.

Step 4 — Set access, price, and catalog

Before publishing, review the commercial and access settings. All the fields below have their own validation:

For prices, coupons, seats, and the buyer checkout, see Pricing & checkout. For the access models and progressive release, see Publishing and access.

Who can edit what

Editing is divided by role domains. Organization owners and admins have access to everything; delegates only see their own domain.

Step 5 — Review as a learner

Turn on Learner preview in the editor. The preview removes the authoring controls and reproduces the reading, navigation, and activities exactly as the learner will see them. Cards appear only when they are part of the interaction — quiz, flashcard, reference, or media — and the rest follows the page's normal flow.

Check especially:

• the pacing between headings, text, and interactive blocks;
• the legibility of images, video, and tables;
• the options and feedback of the activities;
• the references to other modules;
• the behavior at a smaller screen width.

Step 6 — Publish

When the content is ready, publish the current version. Publishing:

• copies the draft to the published version — what the learner now reads;
• records the publication date;
• recomputes the sections (to anchor progress) and the references between modules.

Publishing happens in place: there is no separate version row. The learner simply receives the latest content, and progress survives because it is indexed by stable section identifiers. For references, Cursiva keeps only the links to published contents from the same organization — targets from another organization, not yet published, deleted, or that would form a cycle remain inert.

Step 7 — Share

After publishing, the content gets a canonical public URL, formed by the organization's slug and the content's slug. From there you can:

• share the public link directly with learners;
• keep the content listed so that it appears in the catalog (remember: catalog = published and listed);
• embed the content in another site using the embed options.

Contents that exist only as internal modules of a larger course should stay unlisted — they do not appear as standalone cards in the catalog, but they remain accessible within the course that references them.

Rules worth remembering

Next steps