Headless CMS and visual editing

We migrate organisations off legacy CMS platforms onto headless Plone Volto. The reasons most clients come to us: editor pain, hosting cost, accessibility debt, brand-design changes that the old CMS won't let through. We've been doing these migrations since 2003.

Why headless

Decoupling the editor from the frontend means designers can ship visual changes without breaking content workflow. It means a single CMS can serve a website, a mobile app, an internal portal and an AI search index from the same source. It means CDN-fronted pages load fast everywhere. The headless trade-off is more moving parts, which is exactly the part we take off your hands.

The editing half: Inka

Decoupling has a cost that headless vendors tend to skip past: once the code that renders a page and the code that edits it are separate, editors stop working on the page and start working on a form beside a preview. That is the usual reason a migration lands badly with the people who have to use it every day.

So we build the editor back. Inka is our open-source page builder: the blocks an author arranges are your own design system's components, edited in place on the real page, with no parallel set maintained inside the CMS. HM Land Registry's 1862 register runs on it today — Plone 6.1 headless with a Next.js frontend, which is the point: the frontend stays yours. The argument in full is in Can you have true WYSIWYG editing with MACH?, and how it got its name is in Hydra is now Inka.

It is not tied to Plone. The Plone adapter is the one in service today because Inka grew out of Volto; adapters for WordPress and Drupal are close behind, and the adapters are shaped to fit each backend rather than flattening them into one common shape. If you are migrating, that means the editor is not a second lock-in.

Why Plone and Volto

Plone is the most mature open-source CMS for organisations that take governance seriously: workflow, permissions, audit log, content versioning, multi-language and accessibility are first-class — not addons. Volto is the React frontend that turns Plone into a headless CMS with a modern visual editor.

We're long-time Plone core contributors. Dylan Jay (PretaGov co-founder and CTO) has been a Plone committer since 2005. We've shipped 9 PRs into volto-form-block alone, plus contributions to volto-grid-block, the section variation pattern, slots-lite, and the listing variations system. When something in the platform doesn't fit, we fix it upstream rather than around it.

The NSW Digital Design System reference build

We've implemented the full NSW Digital Design System in Plone 6 / Volto. 16 theme components shadowed. 25 manage components shadowed. 14 addon shadows including volto-form-block, volto-grid-block, and volto-accordion-block. Working demo at digitalnsw.pretagov.com.au. Open source kit at github.com/pretagov/nsw-design-system-plone6-kit.

The point of the reference build: every NSW agency that wants a compliant headless site can start from a working implementation rather than read the spec and hope. Same pattern works for GDS (UK Government Design System) and a couple of state-government design systems we've adapted.

What a migration project looks like

Discovery: content audit, editor interviews, accessibility audit, traffic and SEO baseline.
Architecture: data model, redirects map (every old URL gets a target), CDN and hosting plan.
Visual design: brand application within the design system constraints, editor previews.
Migration build: content import scripts, redirect setup, accessibility sweep.
Editor training and changeover support during launch.
Hosting and partnership thereafter (see our managed hosting service).