# Glossary

> The words these docs use, in one place.

Source: https://docs.dashfordevs.com/v1/introduction/glossary · Topic: Start here · Updated: 2026-11-07

| Term | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| **Organization** | Your business on DashForDevs. Products, orders, customers, content and settings all belong to an organization. One person can belong to several. Ids look like `org__…`. |
| **Member, role, permission** | A member is a person in an organization. A role (Owner, Admin, Member, or one you create) is a set of permissions such as `org:manage` or `inventory.write`. |
| **Dashboard** | dashboard.dashfordevs.com, where an organization's team does day-to-day work. |
| **Service** | One part of the platform that owns one kind of data: inventory, orders, customers, content, shipping, payments, billing, analytics, automations, emails, logs. Each has its own database. |
| **papi** | papi.dashfordevs.com, the public API your website, apps and tools call with an API key. It checks the key and forwards the request to the right service. |
| **tapi** | The private gateway services and the dashboard use to talk to each other. It is not reachable from the internet. |
| **Public key (`pk_…`)** | An API key that is safe in browser code. Read-only, and a live one works only from the website addresses (origins) you allow. |
| **Secret key (`sk_…`)** | An API key that can change data. Server-side only. Never in a browser, an app bundle or a public repository. |
| **Allowed origin** | A website address (for example `shop.example.com`) allowed to use a live public key. |
| **SDK (`dash4devs`)** | The JavaScript library for the public API, with React components and a build tool. |
| **Page group** | A content type you define (for example Services, Team, FAQs). Each item has the fields you choose. Your site reads them through the API. |
| **PHI** | Protected health information: anything that ties a person to their health, including which health product they bought. The platform treats customer data as PHI. |
| **BAA** | Business associate agreement: the HIPAA contract between a business and a vendor that handles PHI for it. |
| **HIPAA organization** | An organization marked as holding PHI. Stricter rules apply, such as no third-party tools without a BAA. |
| **Audit log** | The append-only, hash-chained record every service keeps of what was done, by whom, to which records. It never stores the values. |
| **Trace** | One thing a person did (a page view, a save), followed across every service that took part. Shown in the dashboard under Logs. |
| **Cloud app, Cloud database** | A website or service deployed from GitHub on DashForDevs Cloud, and a managed Postgres database there. |
| **MCP server** | The Model Context Protocol endpoint that lets an AI assistant work with one organization's content, using that organization's secret key. |