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The dashboard has two front-end flows sharing one backend, toggled from the sidebar (persisted in localStorage, so the choice survives a reload). This isn’t a relabeling of the same screens — simple mode is a genuinely separate set of pages: each route under web/src/routes/ renders a technical page or its simple-mode counterpart from web/src/lib/pages/simple/ based on web/src/lib/stores/ui-mode.svelte.ts’s UiMode ("technical" | "simple").

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Technical mode

The full dashboard: projects group deployments, deployments have build strategies (Dockerfile/nixpacks/compose/image/static), env vars (secret and non-secret), access control, deploy history with rollback, live log streaming, and per-service resource numbers (CPU/memory limits, health check status, host port). This is what every doc other than this one describes.

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Simple mode

Built for someone who wants “a blog” or “a password manager” running, not someone who wants to configure a Dockerfile. Concretely:
  • No project concept. SimpleAppsPage flattens every deployment across every project into one “Your apps” list — a user never sees or manages a project as a separate thing.
  • “Add an app” is one click, not two. AddAppModal shows only user-facing templates (blog, website builder, password manager, website monitor, automation, visitor stats, spreadsheet database, app backend, Git hosting, app platform — see SIMPLE_TEMPLATES in web/src/lib/plainCopy.ts) with plain names and one-sentence blurbs, deliberately excluding the standalone database templates (Postgres/MySQL/MongoDB/Redis): those exist as backing services other templates install alongside themselves, not something a non-technical user would knowingly add on their own. Picking one auto-creates a throwaway project behind the scenes (named after the app) and installs the template into it — the two-step technical flow (create project, then install into it) collapses into one action the user never sees split apart.
  • Plain-language status, not the raw status enum: plainStatus() in plainCopy.ts maps running → “Running”, pending/building → “Starting up”, stopped → “Turned off”, failed → “Having a problem”. No raw env var table, no CPU/memory numbers, no build-strategy internals on SimpleAppDetailPage.
  • Two actions, not the full technical action set: Try again (re-triggers a deploy; shown only when the app has failed) and Remove (same delete-with-confirmation flow as technical mode, plain-language copy). There’s deliberately no start/stop toggle: Mangrove’s orchestrator has no way to stop a running deployment without deleting it (see architecture.md’s deploy flow — there’s no “stopped by user request” state, only “never deployed”/“running”/“failed”), so simple mode doesn’t show a control that wouldn’t do anything real.
  • Escape hatch, not a dead end: a “Switch to advanced view” button on SimpleAppDetailPage flips the global mode back to technical on the same URL — that route’s +page.svelte just renders DeploymentDetailPage instead of SimpleAppDetailPage for that same /projects/:id/deployments/:id path, so nothing about the underlying data changes, only which component renders it.
  • Admin stays technical-only. Users, ports, GitHub tokens, resource pruning — none of it has a simple-mode equivalent; the nav link is simply hidden in simple mode (lib/components/Layout.svelte). It’s still reachable by switching back to technical mode, or by navigating to /admin directly (the route itself doesn’t check mode — only the sidebar entry point is hidden).

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Known limitation

Removing an app in simple mode deletes the deployment but leaves behind its now-empty auto-created project. It’s invisible in simple mode (which only lists deployments, never empty projects), but shows up as a zero-deployment project if you switch to technical mode. Not destructive, just a little untidy — not addressed here since it wasn’t part of the original scope, but straightforward to add (delete the parent project too if it has zero remaining deployments after the delete) if it turns out to matter in practice.

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Adding a new template to simple mode

A template only appears in simple mode’s gallery if it has an entry in SIMPLE_TEMPLATES (web/src/lib/plainCopy.ts). See templates.md’s “Adding a new template” section, step 3.