Glossary
Shared vocabulary for the laikacms bounded context. Terms here are load-bearing: code, docs, and ADRs use them with exactly these meanings. Background for the first three entries is in ADR-003.
protocol
The entire laikacms bounded context: the repository contracts (DocumentsRepository, AssetsRepository, StorageRepository) plus the default implementations built on top of other repositories. It knows only atoms, folders, keys, metadata, and summaries; the content field is the user's own arbitrary JSON and is never interpreted. Laika minus the CMS is "basically a protocol".
repository
One individual contract within the protocol: documents, assets, or storage. Implementations range from real sources (filesystem, R2, S3, WebDAV, Drizzle, Obsidian) to compositions over other repositories (contentbase, JSON:API proxy).
adapter
A CMS-specific integration built on repositories, also called a backend. The adapter owns every opinionated choice its CMS needs (entry shapes, slugs, workflow states, deploy previews, commit messages). For Decap this is the laika backend in the decap-cms repo. CMS features never move from an adapter into the protocol; swapping one CMS's adapter for another's is a migration by design.
version
An opaque per-record change token, exposed as the optional version field on documents, unpublished records, record summaries, and assets. It changes if and only if the record's content changed, and is comparable only by equality; it is never parsed or interpreted. A git blob or commit sha, a database row version, and an R2 ETag are all valid implementations. Capability-gated via getCapabilities().versionTracking.
sync token
An opaque per-scope change token returned by getSyncToken(options?). One token covers one scope: a folder, or the whole store when no folder is given. It changes whenever anything inside the scope changes, making it a cheap "did anything change?" polling primitive. A git implementation returns the branch head sha; a database implementation returns a sequence or max(updatedAt). Capability-gated via getCapabilities().changes.syncToken.
change feed
The listChanges({ since, folder? }) stream: enumerates what changed inside a scope since a previously obtained sync token, as { key, version?, deleted } change summaries. The stream's done value carries the new sync token to resume from. Capability-gated via getCapabilities().changes.changeFeed.
atom / folder
The storage domain's generic vocabulary: an atom is either a storage object or a folder. These are wrappers around the user's content, not a data model imposed on it.