About

Inka is an open-source, design-system-first page builder for any CMS. It is a toolkit for building the page builder an organisation needs, fitted to its design system and joined up to its content and services. Editors get a good visual editing experience, and the page builder cannot produce off-system output. Inka is the editing and governance layer, not a CMS: your content stays in the CMS you already run.

Why it exists

Monolithic CMSes carry an upgrade burden. The editing interface, the templates and the content store are one codebase, so every upgrade touches all three at once, and a site's frontend is hostage to its CMS's release cycle. Rewrites get deferred until they are unavoidable, and then they are enormous.

Inka separates them. Composition and editing sit above the stack rather than inside it, so the frontend is independent code you own — upgrade the CMS without rewriting the site, or change the frontend framework and keep the same editing experience.

The editor itself is built on Volto, Plone's open-source React editing UI, so you get a mature block editor, media handling and workflow without building one. Inka's own work is the bridge that lets that editor drive any frontend, and the rules that keep editors inside your design system.

History

Inka was started by Dylan Jay at PretaGov as an answer to that upgrade burden. He proposed and mentored it as a Google Summer of Code topic, and Mohammad Hussain built the proof of concept — successfully. PretaGov then took it on as an internal project to produce the first version.

The first commit landed in May 2024. It has had ten contributors since, and is developed in the open on GitHub under the MIT licence.

The name

It was originally called Hydra, which was a genuinely good name: headless took the head off, and a hydra has many — precisely the multi-frontend claim. But the name is crowded, the idiom is unhelpful (a hydra is an intractable problem that grows back), and the Marvel association has become the dominant one. The line outlived the name: headless took the head off; we give it as many as you need.

Inka refers to Inca masonry — stones shaped to fit their neighbours rather than forced square, laid without mortar, still standing after five hundred years and repeated earthquakes. That is the architecture, not decoration: adapters shaped to fit each backend instead of flattening every backend to a common shape, and fit that is load-bearing rather than something added afterwards.

On the reference. We use it because it is substantive rather than ornamental. Inka is a title rather than a living people's self-name, and the Quechua-derived spelling is the respectful one. We keep everything visual on the masonry-and-engineering side and away from ceremonial or mystical imagery.

Where it stands

Inka is ready for production. It runs the NSW Digital Design System site, which is being rolled out to NSW Government sites. Read the case study.

Getting involved

Inka is open source. The code, issues and roadmap are on GitHub.

If you run sites on a design system, build them for clients, or maintain a content store you would like an adapter for, we would like to hear from you.