Questions, answered.

About inlay

• What is inlay?

  inlay is an editing layer and content management system (CMS) 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. It is made by Cary Digital Design, a studio in Cary, North Carolina, and runs on Cloudflare Workers.

• Who makes inlay?

  Cary Digital Design LLC, a web design and software development studio in Cary, North Carolina, founded by Andrew Byrd. The studio built inlay for its own client work and includes it in every website it builds. Its case study tells the story of why.

• Is inlay a website builder?

  No. inlay doesn't generate a single line of the site's design. A developer builds exactly what they want — markup, CSS, routes, hosting — and inlay adds editing to it.

• How is inlay different from a traditional CMS?

  A dashboard CMS makes the site a rendering of a database you edit somewhere else: the editor guesses what their words will look like, and the preview is an approximation. inlay inverts it. The site is the source of truth for layout, and editing happens in the real browser with the real CSS. The comparison page sets it beside WordPress, website builders and headless CMSs.

• What does the name mean?

  An inlay is a material set into a surface, flush with it — part of the object rather than sitting on top. The editor is inlaid into the site. The name is written in lowercase on this site, and as Inlay elsewhere.

• Is this the same Inlay as the static CMS for Freeway?

  No. An older, unrelated product called Inlay existed as a static CMS for the Freeway web design application. This inlay is a different product, built by Cary Digital Design, with no connection to it. It is also unrelated to inlay as a woodworking or jewelry technique, which is only where the name comes from.

Editing

• What can an editor change without a developer?

  Every text on the site — headings, paragraphs, list items, captions, labels, links and buttons — with bold, italic, underline, color and highlight, and a full rich-text toolbar on prose. Photos: swap, reposition behind the frame, crop. The order of top-level sections. Entries in collections such as posts, events, menu items and staff. Per-page SEO. Form submissions, assets, restore points and analytics are all in the editor too.

  The frame of the site — header, navigation, footer, layout and styling — stays where the developer put it. Changes to those go to the developer as a Dev Help work order from inside the editor.

• Does the site need to be marked up to become editable?

  No. inlay assumes text is editable and discovers it in the browser. Attributes exist for declaring blocks, images, links, collection regions and sections where auto-discovery isn't enough, but marking up is the exception, not the rule.

• Can I break the live site by experimenting?

  No. Everything you change is a private draft until you press Publish. An amber dot marks anything changed but not published, and one click resets it to what is live. Restore points capture the whole site, and an admin can roll it back.

• Does an editor work on a phone?

  Yes. The dock becomes a compact bottom bar and tool windows become bottom sheets. Fixing a typo from a phone is a real workflow, not a degraded one.

• Does inlay slow the site down or change how it looks for visitors?

  No. Visitors never load the editor; it only activates for an authenticated editor. The site is served as the developer built it, from Cloudflare's network, and inlay adds nothing to the page a visitor sees.

Teams and publishing

• How do drafts and publishing work?

  Every edit saves as a draft that only editors can see. Publish moves your edits only — a teammate's half-finished draft stays put. You can claim their draft to take it over, but you can't push it live by accident. Collection entries keep a draft and a published snapshot, so editing a live post never leaks the half-finished version, and an entry with a date goes live on its own.

• Can a team work on the site together?

  Yes. Each person's drafts are their own. Comment pins can be dropped anywhere on the page, with rich text, images, replies, resolve and reopen. @-mentions reach a teammate through a notification tray. Private notes are pins only you can see. The activity log records edits, publishes, backups, restores and form submissions. Roles are member and admin, and the Team panel manages invitations.

• What happens if something goes wrong?

  One click captures content, comments, notes, assets and SEO as a single restore point. You can diff-preview before restoring, download it, or import one back. Anyone can save a restore point; only an admin can roll the site back. If a page has to come down right now, any page but the home page can be hidden from visitors from inside the editor — immediately, with a short note for visitors — and one click puts it back.

Developers and architecture

• What does inlay run on?

  Cloudflare Workers. The whole platform for a site is one Worker — no origin server, no container, no database to run. inlay is written in TypeScript and distributed as one versioned package.

• What services does it need?

  Authentication, content storage, uploads and email are adapters. The defaults are Clerk for sign-in, a GitHub repository for content, Cloudflare R2 for media and Resend for email. Any object implementing the interface works, and every piece is overridable at the call site.

• Does it work with my framework or static site generator?

  The editor is one script tag of vanilla JavaScript, with no framework requirement and no frontend build step, so the page can be written with whatever tooling the developer prefers. The site itself is served by the Cloudflare Worker that inlay is installed into.

• Can a site be extended beyond editing?

  Yes — that's the design. A site adds its own collection schemas, plugins with lifecycle hooks around saves and publishes, scheduled jobs, its own routes and admin pages, and its own database tables, all in the same Worker behind the same sign-in. Open Pattern, an aircraft brokerage, runs its team dashboard, leads inbox, seller pipeline, market-data autofill and listing fees that way.

• Is inlay open source?

  No. inlay is distributed privately. A site extends it through adapters, plugins and its own routes rather than by patching core; if a site would need to patch core, that's treated as a missing extension point.

• How are upgrades handled?

  A site holds its configuration, schemas, plugins and pages — never a copy of inlay — so upgrading is a version bump with no merge conflicts. Shipping an update to every site is the same bump.

• How is it secured?

  Reads are authenticated by default, so an outsider can't enumerate the content model or the drafts. Rich text is sanitized on the server on every save. Roles are enforced on the server, not hidden in the interface, and the health endpoint won't describe the setup to a stranger. A site missing its storage credentials refuses to start rather than quietly running in memory, and inlay never confirms a save it can't keep.

• Where is the developer documentation?

  The developer docs — installing inlay into a Cloudflare Workers site, auth, storage, the markup contract, schemas, plugins and the content API — are shared with each install rather than published. The user guide, for people who edit a site, is public.

Getting inlay, and what it costs

• Can I install it myself?

  Not today. inlay is distributed privately and installed into a site by a developer — yours, or ours. If you'd like access for your developer, get in touch and we'll talk about fit.

• How much does inlay cost?

  Work is scoped and priced in writing before anything starts, so there is nothing to discover halfway through. Cary Digital Design's website projects, which include inlay, typically start around $4,000 with hosting included and no per-change invoices. Retrofitting inlay into an existing site, or building tools on top of it, is quoted on the site in question. Access for your own developer is discussed on inquiry.

• I don't have a developer. Can you do the whole thing?

  Yes. Cary Digital Design will install inlay into your existing site — the design, the copy and the URLs stay exactly where they are — or build you a new site with it in place from the first day, and build the back-office tools your business runs on around it. That's done for you.

• What does "done for you" involve?

  Four steps. A fifteen-minute conversation about what the site is and who needs to edit it — and if inlay isn't the right answer, we'll say so. Scope and price in writing. We build it, with a link you can watch it come together on. Then an hour with your team, which is mostly showing people where to click, and support after that if you want it.

• Where is Cary Digital Design, and does location matter?

  Cary, North Carolina. The site is built, installed and edited online, so where the client is does not change the work.

• How do I get in touch?

  The inquiry form on the home page reaches the person who would do the work. Or email team@carydigitaldesign.com, or call +1 (919) 210-9470.