About
Inka is a design-system-first page-builder toolkit. Agencies and frontend teams use it to build a page builder tailored to their client's design system — one that gives editors a genuinely good visual experience and cannot produce off-system output.
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.
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 in the Plone community's collective organisation.
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. Fitted, not forced.
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.
What works today
Inka is a work in progress and not yet recommended for production. We would rather say plainly what is built than have you discover it later:
Built
The editor, the iframe bridge and the annotations protocol. The Plone adapter. Switching frontends mid-edit.
Architected
Serving different sections of a site from different content stores, edited and audited in one place. The architecture supports it and it is not yet proven on a live site.
Planned
Drupal and WordPress adapters. Design-system conformance checking. AI-assisted authoring under constraint, and an MCP server so agents work through the same rules.
Getting involved
If you are an agency building a page builder for a client's design system, or you maintain a content store you would like an adapter for, we would like to hear from you — those are the two cases Inka is built for.