This is Part 0 of the nine-part app-building tutorial series, the orientation lap. Before scaffolds, schemas, or manifests, the most useful thing we can hand a new developer is an honest map of the three ways Conduction apps actually get built, what each one costs, and what each one gives back. The rest of the series picks one path and shows the receipts. Part 0 explains why.
A second thing matters from minute one: the manifest system and the @conduction/nextcloud-vue component library are two different surfaces. The manifest is the declarative what, a single manifest.json that describes navigation, pages, configuration. nextcloud-vue is the rendering how, the Cn* components the manifest dispatches to (CnAppRoot, CnPageRenderer, CnIndexPage, CnDetailPage, CnDashboardPage, and the rest). They are technically separable. They are also so intertwined in practice that the rest of this series teaches them together, and every lesson names which surface it is touching.
The series uses the OpenAPI Pet Store as the running example: pets, orders, categories, the same entities every API developer has met before. It's the canonical sample domain across the Conduction academy. By the end of the series you have a working PetStore app on the Conduction stack and the mental model to build your own real app on the same patterns.