Cendia is a .NET CMS you add to an ASP.NET Core app, not a platform you deploy and then build inside. Your site is the host; the CMS is a package it references.
Create a site
dotnet new cendia-starter -n MySite
cd MySite
dotnet run
cendia-starter is the only template, and it is the release object — the supported starting
point a release delivers. It is deliberately minimal: one page type, its template, and a content
zone. Bare means nothing you have to delete, not nothing that works.
The first run
Migrate() runs on startup in Development, so the first dotnet run creates the schema against
the connection string in appsettings.json. On a fresh database /cms leads to the setup wizard,
which is where the first account is made.
/ has nothing to render until you publish something. Publish a page from /cms, and / renders
it through the template paired with its type.
What the host actually wires up
Three calls, all in Program.cs:
builder.Services.AddDbContext<CmsDbContext>(options =>
options.UseSqlServer(connectionString));
builder.Services.AddCendia(o =>
builder.Configuration.GetSection("Cendia").Bind(o));
// ...
app.MapCendia();
AddCendia registers the services and the authoring surface. MapCendia maps the CMS UI at
/cms, the delivery and preview APIs, /sitemap.xml, and — when rendering is enabled — the
catch-all that turns a page tree into URLs.
Call UseRouting, UseAuthorization and static files before it. MapCendia registers a little
middleware of its own, because some of it has to sit at an exact point relative to the routes it
maps, and that is an ordering a host should not have to know about or be able to get wrong.
Rendering is a switch
Cendia:EnableRendering decides whether this installation serves pages at all. With it off,
/ redirects to /cms and the CMS is a headless content API. With it on, / is the site's start
page and the editor is still at /cms — it just stops being what the bare hostname answers with.
A headless installation is a supported shape, not a half-configured one.
Where to go next
Content types are C# classes; the editor is built from them. That is the next page, and it is the part of Cendia most worth understanding before you write anything.