Glossary & naming conventions

Aglyn's vocabulary grew through a couple of migrations, so several words name the same thing at different layers. This page is the canonical map (codified in AGL-443). For definitions of every product term — screens, nodes, plugins, workflows, and the rest — see the Term reference; this page is specifically the ruling on the four contested words.

The hierarchy

Organization (org)

The entity. One subscription, one members roster (owner / admin / editor / viewer), one isolation boundary in Firestore (orgs/{orgId}), one plugin switchboard (enabledPlugins), org-scoped shared data (datasets, contacts, media, installs). Every current API, type, and permission is org-named: AglynOrganization, resolveOrgPermissions, getOrgForHost, the console's /org/* section.

Rule: new code that touches the entity says org.

Workspace

The same entity, in the user's language. "Your workspace" is what we call an organization in UI copy and user docs — Slack-style, including the {slug}.aglyn.com workspace subdomain. It intentionally never names a collection or a type.

Rule: workspace appears in UI copy and docs only, never in code identifiers.

Tenant

Two meanings — this is the word to be careful with:

1. The published-site runtime (current, correct use): apps/tenant is the app that renders customers' live sites, and the shared @aglyn/tenant-* libraries serve that side of the platform. "Multi-tenant" in architecture prose uses this sense: the org is the tenancy boundary.
2. A historic alias for the org's billing doc (now removed): before the organizations migration, billing lived at tenants/{uid}. The collection is retired and, as of AGL-444, so are the alias identifiers — AglynTenant is now AglynOrgBilling, useCurrentTenant() is useCurrentOrg() (returning org), the plugin-page tenant prop is org, and the Tenant* permission/entitlement types are Org*. The persisted strings went in AGL-445, while the platform was still pre-launch: Stripe billing metadata is keyed orgId, host docs carry only orgId/memberRoles, and the users.{uid}.tenants map is gone. No tenant-spelled data remains to migrate.

Rule: "tenant" means the site runtime, full stop. Code that means the entity says org and types it AglynOrgBilling.

Tenant vs. host — not the same thing

These are the two most-confused terms because both relate to published sites:

• A host is one site: hosts/{hostId}, with its own domain or subdomain, screens, media, and member-role projection. An organization owns many hosts ("3 of 15 sites"). In UI copy a host is called a site.
• The tenant app is the runtime that serves every host: one Next.js deployment that resolves the incoming hostname to a host doc (hostIndex), loads that host's org, and renders its published screens.

So: an org (workspace) owns hosts (sites); the tenant app serves them. A request to bakery.example.com is resolved to a host, whose org decides plugins/entitlements, rendered by the tenant app.

Quick reference

Term	Layer	Names in code	Use for new work
Organization / org	Data model, APIs, permissions	orgs/{orgId}, AglynOrganization, resolveOrg*	✅ the entity
Workspace	UX / docs	— (copy only)	✅ user-facing copy
Tenant (runtime)	Published-site side	apps/tenant, @aglyn/tenant-*	✅ that side of the platform
Tenant (billing alias)	Removed (AGL-444/445)	none — identifiers and persisted strings are both gone	❌ don't reintroduce
Host / site	One published site	hosts/{hostId}, AglynHost	✅ host in code, "site" in copy