Workspace

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Workspace is the visual review surface that ships with Onumia Pro. It puts sandbox review inside the WordPress admin so you can open previews, inspect database changes, share access, and keep several review sessions side by side without losing your place. Where the command runtime and MCP tools are how agents do the work, Workspace is how a person looks at the result before deciding what should happen next.

Who Can See Workspace

Workspace lives inside the Onumia admin app. Administrators can see it when the Pro bundle is present, and invited or Onumia-capable users can use it for sandboxes they are allowed to access. On a standard Onumia install without Pro, the Workspace navigation item is not shown.

Layout

Workspace is organized as a set of nested surfaces, and the nesting is what makes it useful for parallel review. An outer rail on the left holds your workspace sessions. A sandbox sidebar lists the sandboxes you can open. The main area belongs to the selected sandbox and switches between Browser, Merge, Share, and Tasks. The mental model is straightforward: the rail switches between review sessions, the sidebar chooses the sandbox, and the mode tabs choose what you are reviewing for that sandbox.

Workspace Sessions

Workspace sessions are the outer units in the left rail, and they exist to keep unrelated review work from colliding. Each session is tied to one sandbox at a time and carries that sandbox’s active mode, browser tabs, navigation history, merge table selection, and visual color. You can dedicate one session to a content task, another to a design review, and another to admin screens, then switch between them without rebuilding your tabs each time. The currently active session is remembered per user, so reopening Workspace returns you to where you left off.

The sidebar lists sandboxes drawn from the same Overview data the rest of Onumia uses. It is split into Active and Promoted scopes. Active sandboxes open into workspace sessions with Browser, Merge, Share, and Tasks modes. Promoted sandboxes open a promotion-history review surface instead of a browser session, because their preview state is no longer active.

The Promoted scope includes promoted sandboxes, promotion_failed sandboxes, and discarded sandboxes that still have database promotion history. Failed rows are there so they can be inspected and discarded; discarded rows stay there because their rollback artifacts still exist.

Sandbox Modes

Every active sandbox has four mode tabs. Browser opens the sandboxed site preview. Merge shows changed database tables and the staging/promote flow. Share controls who else can review or act on that sandbox. Tasks is reserved for sandbox task review and currently appears as a placeholder so the route is stable while the product surface grows.

Switching modes does not discard the rest of the session. A browser tab you already loaded stays mounted when you inspect Merge or Share and come back, so repeated review does not constantly reload the preview.

Browser Panel

The browser panel is a genuine in-admin browser, not a static iframe. It opens sandbox previews and lets you work with several at once: open new tabs, close and select them, and reorder them by dragging. Within a tab you have the controls you would expect from a browser, including navigating to a URL, going back and forward, reloading, and returning home. There is also a shortcut to open /wp-admin/ for the active sandbox, which is handy for reviewing admin-side changes rather than just the front end.

These browser tabs are the inner layer of the nesting: they belong to the workspace session that is currently active. Each tab persists its title, URL, favicon, and navigation state, so a session restores not just which tabs were open but where each one had navigated to. Workspace prepares the preview frame before the browser appears, then keeps the sandbox context attached as you move around the site, so ordinary same-origin navigation does not drop you back to live data.

Merge gives reviewers a table-first view of the database changes in the selected sandbox. Tables with changes appear first, unchanged tables remain visible below, and selecting rows stages change groups for preflight and promotion. Promotion moves only the staged selection, not the whole sandbox by implication.

Share lets an administrator grant sandbox-specific access by role or by user. Role grants cover broad groups, while a user grant can give one person a more specific permission set for that sandbox. The sidebar shows when a sandbox has been shared so review ownership is visible before you open it.

Opening And Reusing Tabs

There are two layers of tabs to keep in mind. The left rail creates workspace sessions, and the browser panel creates browser tabs inside the active session. Clicking a sandbox in the sidebar reuses the current session when it only has one browser tab; once you are working with several sessions, Onumia keeps each sandbox in its own session so the browser tabs inside that session stay clearly attached to one sandbox.

Display Controls

The settings button at the bottom of the workspace rail exposes two display options, Full screen and Hide header, which together control how much of the surrounding WordPress chrome stays visible. Full screen hides the WordPress admin UI and expands Workspace to fill the entire browser viewport, which is the mode to reach for when you want to review a preview without distraction. Hide header removes Onumia’s own sticky header. The two settings are independent: if Full screen is on but Hide header is off, the Onumia header remains pinned at the top of the expanded view.

Per-User Persistence

Workspace remembers its state per WordPress user and never shares it between users. Reopening Workspace restores your sessions, tabs, and display settings as you left them, while a colleague signing in sees their own.

Promoted View

Opening a promoted sandbox does not create a workspace session, browser tab, or preview frame. It shows the sandbox title, lifecycle actions, and database promotions recorded for that sandbox. Each promotion can be opened to inspect the rows it wrote to live, with before and after values from the rollback artifact.

Rows are marked as revertable, drifted, or already reverted. Select rows to revert them; selecting one row selects its stored change group so the rollback matches the way staging was promoted. A drifted row means the live row changed after promotion, so rollback is blocked until the user explicitly chooses to force it. A reverted row was already covered by a rollback event and cannot be reverted again.

Promoted sandboxes can be reopened into Active status or discarded from this surface when the current user has permission. Discarded sandboxes with promotion history remain inspectable and revertable, but they cannot be reopened because their working resources have been removed.

Current Scope

Workspace covers browser-based review, database merge staging, sandbox sharing, and the current tasks placeholder for active sandboxes. Promotion history and rollback live in the Promoted view. The same merge and promotion concepts are also available through REST and MCP for agent-driven workflows.