What is inlay?

What "an editing layer" means

A traditional CMS makes the website a rendering of a database that you edit somewhere else. inlay inverts that: the site is the source of truth for layout, and editing happens in the real browser, on the real page, with the real CSS.

With a dashboard CMS, an editor writes in a form and guesses what the words will look like; the preview is an approximation of the page. With inlay there is no separate admin to learn. An editor signs in on their own site, a dark toolbar (the dock) appears along the bottom, and every heading, paragraph, list item, caption, label, link and button becomes editable where it sits. Nothing needs marking up to become editable: inlay discovers the text in the browser.

Every change saves as a draft that only editors can see. An amber dot marks anything changed but not yet published, and one click resets it to what is live. Nothing reaches visitors until someone presses Publish, and publishing moves only that person's edits, so a teammate's half-finished draft stays put.

The name is the metaphor. An inlay is a material set into a surface, flush with it: part of the object rather than something sitting on top. The editor is inlaid into the site.

Who makes it

inlay is built by 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 because custom websites used to force a choice: call a developer for every typo, or accept a page builder and a site that looks like one. Every website Cary Digital Design builds now ships with inlay in it, from café menus to the aircraft listings of Open Pattern. The product site is tryinlay.com, and the studio's own case study tells the longer story.

inlay is distributed privately. It is installed into a site by a developer, either the site owner's own developer or Cary Digital Design, which also offers it done for you: installed into an existing site, or built into a new one. There is no self-serve signup and it is not open source.

What it includes

inlay is a complete content management system, not only a text editor. The editor, drafts and publishing, collections, forms, analytics, team tools and restore points all ship in the one package.

On the page

• Click-to-edit text on every text on the site, with bold, italic, underline, color and highlight. Prose gets the full toolbar: headings, quotes, lists, links, images, code blocks, buttons in the site's own styles, and clean paste from Word and Google Docs.
• Photos: swap from an image library, drag the subject behind its frame without cutting anything away, crop when you do want to cut, with WebP optimization in the browser.
• Section reordering with up and down arrows. Header, navigation and footer stay where the developer put them.
• Preview as a visitor would see it, framed for desktop, tablet or phone.

Collections, the CMS part

• For repeating things (blog posts, events, menu items, staff bios, listings) the developer defines a typed schema and inlay generates the form. Field types: text, rich text, image, file, number, boolean, date, reference, select and repeater.
• Every entry keeps a draft and a published snapshot. Set a date and it goes live on its own. Search reads the body, not only the title. Validation runs on the server and comes back per field.
• Per-collection SEO templates give a new post a correct title, description and social image without anyone opening the SEO panel.

Working together

• Comment pins anchored to their section, with rich text, images, replies, resolve and reopen. @-mentions, a notification tray and announcements.
• Private notes only you can see. An activity log of edits, publishes, backups, restores and form submissions. A team panel with member and admin roles and invitations. Dev Help work orders to the developer.

Running the site

• Built-in analytics with no cookies and no third-party script: views, visitors, top pages, referrers and a phone, tablet and desktop split over 7, 30 or 90 days. Editors' own visits are never counted.
• Forms with a submissions inbox and CSV export. An asset library for everything uploaded. Per-page SEO with previews.
• Restore points that capture content, comments, notes, assets and SEO in one click, with a diff preview before restoring. Emergency page takedown that takes effect immediately, with a note for visitors, and one click to put the page back.

Safety

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

The editor also works on a phone: the dock becomes a compact bottom bar and tool windows become bottom sheets, so fixing a typo from a phone is a real workflow. The user guide walks through all of it.

How it is built

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

• One core, thin sites. A site holds its configuration, its collection schemas, its plugins and its own pages, never a copy of inlay. Upgrading every site is a version bump with no merge conflicts, because nothing was forked.
• Adapters. 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. Point the site at your services and inlay detects them.
• One script tag on the page. The editor is vanilla JavaScript with no framework requirement and no frontend build step, so it works with whatever the site is written in. Visitors never load it; it only activates for an authenticated editor.
• Built to be built on. Plugins hook into collection writes (for example before a save or a publish) and can transform or veto them. A site can add scheduled jobs, its own routes and admin pages, and its own database tables, all in the same Worker behind the same sign-in, reading and writing through the same content engine the editor uses.
• Content back to the repository. What editors publish can be committed back to the site's own repository as reviewable markdown, so the copy visitors read and the copy in the templates stop drifting apart.

Open Pattern, an aircraft brokerage, is the worked example: its brokers edit listing pages the way anyone edits an inlay site, and the team dashboard, leads inbox, seller pipeline, market-data autofill, listing fees and Q&A moderation were all built on the same core, in one Worker, with one login. The developer section of the home page shows the schema and plugin code.

Who it is for

inlay is for organizations that want a fully custom website and still want to edit it themselves, and for the developers and studios who build those sites.

• Small businesses, nonprofits and startups whose menus, events, posts, staff and prices change often, and who do not want a dashboard to learn or an invoice for every typo.
• Developers and agencies who build custom sites on Cloudflare Workers and want to hand clients an editor that respects the markup, the CSS and the URLs they wrote, with no theme underneath.
• Businesses whose site will grow into software: a portal, a listings database, a back office. Those are built into the same codebase instead of becoming a separate app with a separate login.

What it is not

• Not a website builder. inlay does not generate a single line of the site's design. A developer builds exactly what they want and inlay adds editing to it.
• Not a WordPress plugin or theme. It is an alternative to a dashboard CMS, not an add-on to one. The comparison page sets it beside WordPress, website builders and headless CMSs.
• Not self-serve, and not open source. It is distributed privately and installed by a developer.
• Not the "Inlay" for Freeway. An older, unrelated product with the same name existed as a static CMS for the Freeway web design application. This inlay, from Cary Digital Design, is a different product with no connection to it. It is also unrelated to inlay as a woodworking or jewelry technique, which is where the name comes from.

Facts at a glance

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