Content management first. Useful extras built around it.
Hydra is a multi-site content management system. It also contains a growing collection of tools for selling, handling enquiries, managing work and using AI. This page separates established CMS capabilities from newer areas that are still evolving.
The centre of Hydra is still the CMS
Hydra is built to manage websites first: pages, posts, media and the people who maintain them, across more than one site from a single platform.
The extra tools described below sit alongside that foundation rather than replacing it.
Build, publish and maintain your sites
Established capabilities for keeping website content organised and up to date.
Pages and sections
Build and edit pages, work with sections and keep content organised.
Rich-text editing
Write and update content without rebuilding the website.
Blogs and news
Publish posts and manage ongoing updates.
Media and files
Keep images and other content assets alongside the site.
Themes and presentation
Tools for managing the appearance of pages and reusable presentation choices.
Multi-site management
Separate content, settings and users across sites from one platform.
Custom content types
Represent structured content that isn't just a page, product or blog post.
Shop features in the same system as your website
Hydra includes shop features as part of the same system as its website and content tools.
This covers products and product groups, checkout and order workflows, and stock-related functionality, with more detailed inventory and stock movement work underway. Import paths for shop data include Shopify and WooCommerce-oriented presets.
Commerce requirements vary enormously, so individual integrations and workflows should be checked before assuming they're supported.
Capture and follow up what your website generates
A website creates business records as well as content. Hydra is developing that side of the picture too, with contact and enquiry records, person records and links between people and contacts.
Site administration views support follow-up, forms and other methods capture information, and agent-assisted enquiry handling is available subject to configured tools and permissions.
These are useful foundations for customer follow-up. They are not a claim that Hydra currently replaces a specialist CRM in every respect.
Keep operational information close to the website
Hydra includes projects and project-related information, subprojects and task or to-do notes, and tools for agents to work with permitted project information. Structured records support site-specific workflows.
The long-term idea is to keep operational information close to the website and the people using it, where that makes sense.
AI capabilities beyond content drafting
Hydra's AI tooling is wider than the content assistant originally described on this website, and remains subject to ongoing testing and refinement.
Content assistance
Draft, edit and reshape pages, posts and other site content.
Agent chat
Ask questions and work with the tools an agent is permitted to use.
Tool calling
Agents can perform multiple steps rather than only return text.
Visual processes
Define a sequence of tools, agent steps, conditions, loops and other actions using the process editor.
Human intervention
Confirmation and approval steps for work that should not be performed unattended.
Debugging and runs
Inspect process status and execution traces during development and testing.
Model selection
A database-driven AI model catalogue and configuration tools.
Knowledge sources
Give agents context from permitted information, with access controls.
A browser-based phone, built into your site's admin
This is one of the areas we're most interested in extending.
Built in the current development work: site-level phone configuration subject to permissions, a browser-based staff phone using SIP/WebRTC, incoming-call handling that rings staff before falling back, greetings and voicemail recording, outbound calling from the web phone, voice selection and greeting previews, and call records with operational logs.
Still being designed or extended: more flexible visual call routing and transfer flows, connecting callers to identity checks, support requests and other business processes, greater use of agents in call handling with clear limits and hand-offs, and usage reporting and billing arrangements.
Bring existing data into Hydra
Browser-based import workflows support CSV, JSON, XLSX and BSON, with mapping into supported Hydra record types. Presets cover common ecommerce sources, and there is existing work on WordPress imports and related migration tools. External service integrations are available where configured.
Imports are useful, but unusual or heavily customised source data should always be tested before migration.
Security is ongoing engineering work
No feature list should be read as a guarantee that a deployment is suitable for every regulated environment without further assessment.
Multi-site data separation
Keep content, settings and users for each site separate.
Roles and capabilities
Site roles and capability-based access control.
Two-factor and passkeys
Stronger sign-in with two-factor authentication and passkeys.
Agent permission checks
Permission checks around agent tools and sensitive actions, with human approval for selected agent operations.
Logging and tracing
Logging and operational tracing to help understand what happened and when.
Hardening and testing
Security hardening and automated tests across the platform.
Manage Hydra day to day
Hydra provides an administrative dashboard with configurable widgets, alongside notifications, job monitoring and background workers. Scheduled tasks and processes are supported where available.
Mobile app work covers selected management and agent features. Some mobile features require an updated app build and may not be at parity with the web interface.
Where Hydra is heading
Hydra is already a CMS with business tools. Over time, those tools may support much more of the day-to-day work of running a business, though we're not calling it a finished business management system yet. If you have a real workflow in mind, we'd rather discuss what is supported, what needs building and what doesn't make sense than promise a box-ticking feature list.
Hydra by Photonsurge v1.5.16