Are stories for plugin layout components (SideNav, Layout, etc.) intentionally omitted?

[ayhid]

Hello,
I noticed that the Strapi Design System doesn't include Storybook stories for common components used when building plugins, such as:

• SideNav / SubNav
• Layout / plugin page structures
• Other admin panel composition components

Is this intentional? If so, what's the recommended way to understand the API and usage patterns for these components when developing custom plugins?

[HichamELBSI]

Hi @ayhid good question,

The Strapi Design System is used across multiple Strapi apps (Cloud, CMS admin & plugins) Because of that, it focuses on generic, composable building blocks rather than CMS-specific layouts or opinionated page structures.

CMS-oriented components like SideNav, SubNav, HeaderLayout, TwoColsLayout, MainNav, etc. were moved out of the Design System v2 and into the Strapi admin codebase (so they aren’t exported from @strapi/design-system anymore). You can see the full official list of removed CMS-specific components here: https://design-system.strapi.io/iframe.html?viewMode=docs&id=getting-started-migration-guides-v1-to-v2--docs&globals=#removed-cms-specific-components

This was a deliberate choice. It keeps the Design System reusable and product-agnostic. The Design System gives you all the primitives (Box, Flex, Grid, forms, navigation, tokens, etc.) to compose your own layouts without enforcing CMS-specific patterns.

That said, if you do want to use those CMS-oriented layouts for your plugin UI, you can still import them directly from the Strapi admin package (@strapi/strapi/admin) in your plugin code.

For examples and usage patterns, the best references are the Strapi admin source code itself and existing core and community plugins.

The Storybook intentionally shows only the generic component APIs, not CMS page structures.