Build a ceramics shop, step by step

Goal: see what you will build in this guide, and in what order.

Who this is for: shop owners and editors. You do not need any technical knowledge. There is one short part for developers at the end.

Time: about 5 minutes to read.

The finished shop page: products in groups — Tea bowls, Vases, Jars and Bowls — each with a photo, a name, a glaze and a price

The story

Clay & Kiln is a small pottery studio. Two potters make tea bowls, vases, jars and bowls by hand. They want a website where people can:

see every piece with a photo, a price and a short text,
find pieces by group (tea bowls, vases…),
order a piece with a simple form.

In this guide you build that website yourself, in the admin, one step at a time. Every step has a picture, so you can check that your screen looks the same.

What you need

An admin account on a rustango-cms site that can create pages, page types, menus and settings. If you are not sure, ask the person who manages your site.
The 14 example photos. You can download them from the example shop folder. You can also use your own photos.

For developers: the example site is in examples/ceramics_shop. How to start it is written at the top of its main.rs file.

The chapters

Do the chapters in this order. Each one uses what you made in the chapter before it.

Part 1 — The shop window

#	Chapter	What you do
1	Your shop's name and colours	Type the shop name, the tagline, the colours and the footer text once. Every page uses them.
2	Add your photos	Upload all photos to the media library in one go.
3	The home page	Make the front page with a big photo, a heading and a welcome text.

Part 2 — The products

#	Chapter	What you do
4	Make a "Product" page type	Decide which boxes every product has: price, glaze, photo, description. No code.
5	Groups of products: categories	Make the groups Tea bowls, Vases, Jars and Bowls.
6	The shop page	Make the page that shows all products.
7	Add your products	Add ten products and put each one in a group.

Part 3 — Help people find things

#	Chapter	What you do
8	The main menu	Build the menu at the top of every page: add pages and your own links, change the order, put items inside other items.

Part 4 — Content everywhere, and orders

#	Chapter	What you do
9	Reusable text	Write the shipping information once in the Library, show it on an "About us" page and on every product, and change it in one place.
10	The order form	Build an order form, put it on the product pages, get each order by email and read the orders in the admin.

Part 5 — Grow

#	Chapter	What you do
11	Be found on Google	Write SEO titles and descriptions, check the sitemap, rename a page without breaking links, and add your own redirects.
12	A second language	Add French, then translate the pages, the menu, the shipping text and the order form.
13	A members area	Show trade prices only to cafés and shops: a role, a private page, sign-up, a friendly "not yet" page and a menu item only members see.
14	Work as a team	Add a helper, check each new product before it goes live, send it back with a note, and review changes to live products.
15	A sale	Prepare a sale page now; the site publishes it at a set time and takes it down again a week later.
16	Let an AI agent help	Give an AI assistant a key that can only write drafts, let it add a product, then check and publish it yourself.

For developers

Chapter	What you learn
Show menus and settings in templates	The template helpers `menu()`, `auto_menu()` and `site_setting()`, as the shop uses them.
The helper traits	How the shop's code-made parts work: `#[derive(PageType)]`, `PageTypeOverrides`, `LibraryTypeHandler`, `TaxonomyHandler` and `register_site_setting!`.
A headless storefront	Show the shop on a second website in plain JavaScript: pages, photos, blocks and the menu from the JSON API.
Preview drafts on your own frontend	Let editors see a draft in that website, inside the editor and in a new tab, with a preview token.

Start with chapter 1: Your shop's name and colours.