The starter project

Building a new product with its own sign-in, billing and admin screens is most of the work before you get to write the part that makes your product different. The starter project is a ready-to-run SaaS application built on the same foundations as Bizinly itself, so that work is already done.

What you get out of the box

• Accounts — sign in, sign up (with optional bot protection), e-mail confirmation by code, forgot/reset password, two-step sign-in (an authenticator app or an e-mail code), and a profile area (photo, contact details, language, password, devices).
• An admin area — an overview checklist for a new project, People (roles, activate/deactivate, invite), Settings (project details, sign-up rules, e-mail with a test send, website/analytics/consent, security, subscriptions), Plugins (turn features on or off, with their own settings), and Logs (activity, sign-ins, blocked addresses, locked accounts).
• Subscription billing — plans priced through Stripe, Stripe Checkout, a customer portal, and a webhook that keeps subscription status in sync.
• A public site — a landing page, plugin-provided public pages (legal pages, a storefront, and so on), footer links, a consent banner with analytics, a maintenance screen, and a sitemap.
• Plugins — the same plugin system Bizinly itself runs on (see Plugins): add a feature by switching it on, not by writing it.
• Multiple languages, with a switcher, from day one.

None of this is scaffolding you delete later — it is the same account, billing and admin code Bizinly runs, kept up to date by pulling in a new package version rather than by copying files around.

Connected, or standing alone

A project chooses its mode in the setup wizard, and can change it later:

• Connected to a Bizinly installation — the usual case. The project shares its people and its data with a Bizinly installation: signing in to the project is signing in to that installation, and the project is effectively another front door onto it (a storefront in front of Bizinly's orders and invoices, for example). Anyone who signs up through the project becomes a customer of that installation.
• Standalone — the project is its own tenant, with its own data, and no Bizinly installation behind it at all.

A plugin that depends on a Bizinly module — a storefront plugin needing stock levels from an inventory module, for instance — only works once the project is connected; standalone, it shows as unavailable until it is.

The setup wizard

The first time a fresh project runs, it opens a short wizard instead of its normal screens:

1. Project — name, support e-mail, colour, logo, default language.
2. Mode — connected (point it at a Bizinly installation) or standalone (a new tenant is created for the project itself).
3. E-mail — the project's own outgoing mail server, with a test send.
4. Extras — analytics and payment keys, if you have them yet.
5. Owner — a standalone project creates its first account here; a connected project signs in as an existing owner or admin of the Bizinly installation it is joining, so the wizard never grants itself access it should not have.

Each step saves as you go, so closing the browser and coming back resumes where you left off. Once it has finished, the wizard does not reappear — the same settings move into the admin area.

Starting a new project

A new project starts from the starter template rather than by copying screens out of Bizinly: rename it, point it at a database, run the setup wizard, and you have a running application before you have written a line of your own code. From there, your own screens sit alongside the built-in account, billing and admin ones, and any plugin you switch on adds the rest.

Typical uses

• A storefront or customer-facing product that should feel like its own brand, while still writing its orders, invoices and payments into an existing Bizinly installation.
• A focused, single-purpose tool — for one customer, or for internal use — that still needs proper accounts, roles and an admin area, without building all of that from nothing.
• A fully independent product that only happens to share Bizinly's plugin system and its way of doing accounts and billing.

Access to the starter project is arranged with the Bizinly team — book a call to talk through what you are building.

Related: Overview & architecture, Plugins, Bizinly Admin.