Platform Themes glossary

This page is the source of truth for Platform Themes terms. Docs, product copy, API fields, and code use these words with exactly these meanings. When a term drifts, fix the usage — not this page — unless the change is a deliberate product decision.

The big idea

Platform Themes is a PaaS framework that makes infrastructure disappear for the developer — and an onramp to Konstruct for when that ceiling is reached. Every platform theme runs on Konstruct, so outgrowing the abstraction won't be a migration: the plan is to eject into the professional IDP experience that was underneath you the whole time, without moving anything. This is on the roadmap; see Eject below for status.

Core terms

Term	Meaning
Platform Themes	The product: the versioned set of resources (zones, apps, characters) and API shapes that themes render, plus the brand for the whole PaaS layer. The underlying API is the theme contract.
Themes	The screen (in the Platform as a Service section of navigation) where an organization manages its themes: install from upstream, register, build one with the Forge, launch.
Forge	The fill-in-the-blank builder, reached from Themes, that has the platform LLM design a theme-manifest.yaml, write a working theme, push it to git, and register it from a short description.
Theme	A frontend in a Git repository that implements the theme contract under its own metaphor. Themes are presentation only — the backend never branches on a theme.
Konduit	The built-in business theme, preinstalled and pinned with every Konstruct organization. The zero-install default experience.
Ship It!	The retro arcade theme — planets, rockets, and a hero. Available upstream; an admin installs it.
Launcher	The button in Themes that opens a theme with the signed-in user's session. A theme is always launched into one organization; it never selects one.
Broker	The part of the Konstruct shell that receives a theme's postMessage calls, validates the sender, pins the organization, sanitizes path segments, and performs the API call with the user's session. The only place a theme's credential-free call ever meets a real credential.
Eject	Planned: leaving the theme abstraction for the full Konstruct experience without moving anything, because the resources were Konstruct resources all along. Not yet available.

Resources (the real things)

Term	Meaning
Zone	The payment unit and isolation boundary apps ship into. Org-level truth: a zone bought in any theme is the same real infrastructure in every theme — a big planet in Ship It! is a big farm in a farm theme is a big environment in Konduit. An organization's first zone is free.
Band	What a zone physically is: a fixed capacity tier (small, medium, large) from the built-in catalog. Bands are defined in code; rate cards price them, administrators cannot redefine them.
Upgrade	A purchased capacity increment applied on top of a zone's band.
App	The resource unit: a repository the platform builds and serves. An app has a size (s, m, l) and either fits its zone or does not.
Fit rule	Summed over a zone's apps, size × replicas must stay within the zone's capacity, for CPU and memory both. Themes preview it; the platform enforces it.
Character	The signed-in user's cross-theme progression ledger: appearance, XP, quests, gear, loadout. XP is global — earned in one theme, visible in all. Keys are theme-namespaced. Optional: business themes ignore it.
Rate card	Administrator-priced SKU list for chargeback. Prices are informational; there is no payment integration.

Distribution

Term	Meaning
UPSTREAM	The blessed public home of first-party themes. A static label — it names the relationship, not the vendor.
PLATFORM	The platform team's copy of a theme, pulled from upstream. What organizations consume.
ORG	An organization's own instance of a theme, pulled from the platform team. Where customization lives.
Provenance chip	The UPSTREAM / PLATFORM / ORG indicator on every Themes entry: whose copy you are looking at, and what it points back to.
zone cluster	A cluster provisioned from the zone cluster template: the shipping ground an organization's themes deploy apps into. Creating one is the zero-state Platform Themes experience.
Shipping ground	Informal name for a zone cluster's role: where apps land.
Seeded theme	A theme the platform ensures exists (create-if-absent) so the ecosystem starts populated — Konduit is seeded everywhere.
Pinned theme	An installed theme surfaced in the Platform as a Service section of navigation. Pin and unpin from Themes. Konduit is pinned and locked by the platform.

Authoring

Term	Meaning
Theme manifest (theme-manifest.yaml)	The theme's full self-description at the repository root: profile, metaphor, vocabulary, character, tiers, ship moment, shop, progression, universe view. Builder output, generator input, and registration record in one file. See the theme specification.
THEME.md	The human-readable contract file at a theme repository's root. Its header (version, capabilities, vocabulary) is a faithful subset of the manifest.
static/theme.js	The vendored client: launch detection, discovery, and the contract operations in one small file. Copy it byte-for-byte and keep it — the platform verifies it and rejects a modified copy.
theme-icon.png	The theme's face, served from its root and shown in the Themes registry.
Discovery	The bootstrap document (/theme/discovery/{org}): capabilities, band and size catalogs, rates, org identity. Themes render from it and never hardcode it.
Capability	A theme contract area a theme declares it implements (apps, zones, shop, character, universe). Implementing a subset is legitimate.
Vocabulary	The theme's mapping of contract terms to its own words (zone → planet, app → rocket, deploy → launch).
Profile	How much of the theme contract a theme implements: informational (read-only), interactive (full lifecycle), or game (interactive plus the game formula).
Game formula	The recurring shape of a game theme: metaphor, character, tiered zones, ship moment, shop, progression, universe view, surprises. See the game formula.
Ship moment	The celebration a theme runs when an app ships. Required in every profile, skippable, never blocking. Friday ships get the upgraded variant.
Universe view	A game theme's whole-world screen: every zone rendered, permanent visible growth, a one-tap data overlay that defaults to off.
Single-org rule	A theme never selects an organization; it receives one from the launcher and manages only that organization's resources.

Roles

Term	Meaning
Platform team	Creates the shared Kubernetes resources organizations build on: zone clusters, the curated theme set, the rate card.
Organization	Consumes zones, ships apps, plays themes. Owns its theme instances and its resources.
Theme author	Anyone — person or AI assistant — who builds a theme repository against the authoring spec.