A developer builds the site. inlay adds editing to the real page — click the text to change it, drag a photo into place, publish when you're ready. Visitors never see a thing until you say so. And when a project needs more than editing, it's the foundation the rest gets built on.
Distributed privately · installed by a developer — yours or ours
Below is a real site with the real inlay on it — the same editor bundle a client install loads, not a mock-up of one. Click the headline and type; nothing was marked up to make it editable, and it still gets bold, color and highlight. Open Content, drop a comment pin, leave yourself a private note, look at Analytics under More, hit Publish. Everything works except the server, which lives in the page.
the real editor · v0.8.17 · drafts live in the page and reset when you reload · how to use it →
inlay is an editing layer and content management system that a developer builds into a custom-coded website. Editors sign in and the live page becomes the editor: click a headline to change it, drag a photo into place, manage collections of posts or events, and publish when ready. Visitors never see the editor or an unpublished draft.
It is made by Cary Digital Design, a web design and software studio in Cary, North Carolina, and runs on Cloudflare Workers. It is not a website builder and not a WordPress plugin: the site is the source of truth, and inlay is the layer set into it.
Nothing needs marking up to become editable. inlay assumes text is editable and discovers it in the browser — headings, paragraphs, list items, table cells, labels, links and buttons. Marking up is the exception, not the rule.
Dashed outlines appear in edit mode; the draft saves when you click away. Every text — headings, labels and captions included — gets bold, italic, underline, color and highlight. Prose gets the full toolbar: headings, quotes, lists, links, images and code.
Site frames are a fixed shape; photos aren't. Grab the handle and move the subject where you want it — nothing is cut away. Crop is there when you do want to cut.
Top-level sections get up/down arrows. Header, nav and footer are excluded, so the frame of the site stays where the developer put it.
Every edit saves as a draft that only editors can see. An amber dot marks anything changed but not published; click it and it tells you when, and offers a one-click reset back to what's live.
Blog posts, events, menu items, staff bios — the developer defines a schema and inlay generates the form. Every entry keeps a draft and a published snapshot, so editing a live post never leaks the half-finished version. Set a date and it goes live on its own. A file field takes the PDF that belongs to the entry — a menu, a report, a price list.
Multi-term, in any order, with the markup stripped out of rich text. Sort by created, last edited, published, alphabetical, or any numeric field in the collection.
Validation runs on the server and comes back per field, in the form. Per-collection SEO templates mean a new post gets a correct title, description and social image without anyone opening the SEO panel.
Dropped anywhere on the page and anchored to their section, so reordering takes them along. Rich text, images, replies, resolve and reopen.
Type @, pick a teammate. A bell in the corner collects mentions and announcements.
A pin only you can see. Somewhere to think out loud on a page without putting it in front of the client.
A rolling feed of edits, publishes, backups, restores, form submissions and announcements.
One click captures everything — content, comments, notes, assets, SEO — as a single restore point. Diff-preview before you restore, download it as a file, import one back. Anyone can save a restore point; only an admin can roll the site back.
Any page but the home page can be hidden from visitors from inside the editor. It takes effect immediately — no draft, no publish. Visitors get a short "temporarily unavailable" page with whatever note you wrote; editors keep seeing the page as it is, and one click puts it back up.
Reads are authenticated by default, so an outsider can't enumerate your content model or your drafts. Rich text is sanitized on the server on every save. Roles are enforced on the server, not hidden in the UI, and even the health endpoint won't describe your setup to a stranger.
A site missing its storage credentials refuses to start rather than quietly running in memory — and if it ever is running somewhere writes won't survive, every editor sees a standing warning. The product never confirms a save it can't keep.
Editing is where inlay starts, not where it stops. The core is one package; each site adds its own collections, plugins and pages on top. They run in the same Worker, behind the same sign-in, on the same content. A bakery needs a menu. A brokerage needs a sales pipeline. Neither one forks the product.
Open Pattern sells aircraft. Its brokers edit listing pages the way anyone edits an inlay site — click and type. Everything else they do all day was built on top of the same core: a team dashboard, a seller pipeline, market data, payments. None of it is a separate app with a separate login.
What needs attention, the seller pipeline, the review queue and the latest leads on one page.
reads inlay's form storeEvery offer, question and inquiry from every listing, in one filterable inbox.
inlay forms, untouchedSellers get a private guide to upload photos, video, logbooks and disclosures. Brokers review each section, then build the listing from it.
own routes + content engineA listing has too many fields for a side window, so it gets a wide, grouped form — generated from the live schema.
inlay's collections APIOne click fills an aircraft's facts and valuation from a data provider. Scheduled jobs keep them fresh.
plugin + scheduled jobStamped when a listing first goes live, paused while it's under contract. Nobody has to remember a date.
save & publish hooksA buyer's question arrives as a draft entry. A broker answers it, and it's published to the listing.
forms → collectionsRequest the fee, the seller pays on a hosted page, and the listing is marked paid on its own.
own routesThe guide sellers read is edited in place with inlay itself — wording and example photos.
the inlay editor, reusedA site holds its configuration, its schemas, its plugins and its own pages — never a copy of inlay. That can be a dozen lines or a whole back office. Either way, upgrading is a version bump with no merge conflicts, because nothing was ever forked.
import { defineCollection, text, richText, image, select, date } from 'inlay/schema'
export default defineCollection({
name: 'posts',
label: 'Blog posts',
fields: {
title: text({ required: true }),
cover: image({ alt: true }),
body: richText(),
tags: select({ options: ['news', 'notes'] }),
goesLive: date({ schedule: true }),
},
})
// title is a required string; tags is ('news'|'notes')[]import { definePlugin } from 'inlay/plugin'
export default definePlugin({
name: 'listing-clock',
setup(api) {
api.on('beforeSave', (e) => {
if (e.collection !== 'listings') return
return { data: tickClock(e.data) }
})
api.on('beforePublish', (e) => {
if (e.collection !== 'listings') return
return { data: tickClock(e.data, 'publish') }
})
},
})
// stamps the go-live date; pauses under contractinlay is installed into a site by a developer — and Cary Digital Design, the studio that builds inlay, will be that developer. We fit it to the site you already have, build you a new one with the editor in it from the first day, or build the tools your business runs on around it. Same product, without needing to know how any of it works.
We take the site as it stands and wire inlay into it. The design, the copy and the URLs stay exactly where they are — what changes is that you can now edit them.
Cary Digital Design builds the site — design, markup, hosting — with inlay in it from the start. Nothing is bolted on afterwards, so everything you'd reasonably want to change yourself is editable.
When the business needs more than pages — a pipeline, an inbox, a review queue, a dashboard — we build it on the same inlay, so it shares the sign-in, the content and the Worker.
Fifteen minutes on what the site is and who needs to edit it. If inlay isn't the right answer, we'll say so.
Before any work starts, so there's nothing to discover halfway through.
The install, or the new site, with a link you can watch it come together on.
An hour with your team, which is mostly showing people where to click. Support after that if you want it, not as a condition.
Retrofit, new build or tools on top, it starts the same way — a message about what you've got and who's meant to look after it.
Ask for a quote↗One reply from a person — the same person who'd do the work.
More questions — pricing, hosting, security, teams, what it isn't — on the full FAQ.
Tell us how the site is built and we'll tell you what installing inlay looks like. If you'd rather not think about how it's built at all, we'll do that part too.
We'll read it properly and come back to you about whether inlay fits the site.