How to Use Obsidian as a CMS

A content management system does three jobs: it is where you write, where you organize and review content, and where you press publish. Obsidian already does the first two very well. Add a publishing step, and your vault works as a CMS — one that stores everything as plain files you own.

What a CMS usually gives you

An editor for writing and formatting.
Structure: content types, categories, tags.
Workflow: drafts, published pages, archived ones.
Media handling: images attached to each piece.
Publishing to a live site.

How Obsidian covers each part

Editor. Obsidian is the editor. You write in Markdown, with the plugins and shortcuts you already use.

Structure. Folders define what each file is. In a Sentilis setup, a file in press/ is a post or doc, in bio/ a profile page, in market/ a product, in gallery/ a work. Categories and tags live in each note’s properties.

Workflow. A status property does the job of a CMS workflow:

---
name: Pricing FAQ
category: Documentation
status: draft        # draft · published · archived
---

Drafts and archived entries are not visible to readers. Change the status and publish again to move a page along.

Media. Embed images the Obsidian way — ![[diagram.png]] — and the Sentilis plugin resolves embeds, standard images and attachments when you publish. A cover set in the note’s properties is the image used when the page is shared.

Publishing. This is the part Obsidian does not do on its own. With the Sentilis plugin, right-click a note and choose Sentilis → Publish to Press (or Bio, Market, Gallery); Sentilis: Open sidebar lists what you’ve published. The Sentilis CLI syncs a whole folder from the terminal or from CI.

A vault organized as a CMS

vault/
├── Inbox/                 ← private
├── Research/              ← private
└── Site/
    ├── bio/
    │   └── en.md
    ├── press/
    │   ├── changelog-2026-09.md
    │   └── handbook/
    │       ├── index.md
    │       ├── onboarding.md
    │       └── attachments/
    └── market/
        └── consulting-hour.md

When you sync with the CLI, only Site/ is published. handbook/ is one entry with sub-pages: index.md is the main page and every other .md next to it becomes a section, one level deep.

Versioning and collaboration

Because everything is a file, you can put Site/ under Git. Every change becomes a commit, and a push can trigger publishing: run sentilis sync in CI with your profile token and the site updates when you merge.

What changes compared to a traditional CMS

Your content is not locked in a database; it is Markdown on your disk.
There is no admin panel to learn — the editor is Obsidian.
The design comes from Sentilis layouts instead of a theme you maintain.

Use your Obsidian vault as your website’s source →