The design is finished and beautiful, and then during the build someone says “the CMS cannot really do that”. The conversation goes one of two ways: trim the design, or build a screen editors cannot touch. Both bill you later.
Change the order and the conversation never happens. Decide which regions editors can change before designing, and the design is made inside that constraint from the start. A constraint is not a cut to your creativity — it is a way of settling the negotiation in advance.
What follows from widening the editable area
“Make everything editable” sounds generous, but it is a decision to hand over control of the design. Let editors choose colours and a colour outside the palette eventually appears; let them set spacing and a value outside the scale appears. And it appears on a screen the designer never sees.
How far to hand over
The practical boundary sits between site chrome and body content. The chrome — header, footer, landing sections, the structure of listing screens — is owned by code. The body is owned by editors.
This site runs on exactly that rule. Landing sections, header and footer live in code; what the editing screen can change is the article body. The reason is not distrust of the administrator — it is that a layout stored in the database cannot be recovered: it leaves no trace in version control, it becomes a manual copy when moving from staging to production, and it cannot be reproduced by automation.
The other half matters just as much: always give editors the body. A structure where fixing one sentence requires a developer stops content from accumulating, and the site quietly ages.
Writing the constraints into the design
Decisions made only out loud evaporate. A line beside each composition is enough — “editors may add paragraphs and lists here only”, “image ratio fixed, cropping automatic”, “this section is fixed and cannot be reordered”.
With those lines present the developer knows immediately how to build the editing screen, and the designer can picture the worst screen an editor could produce. If that worst case is tolerable, the design is safe.
The relationship between themes and the editing environment is covered further in the themes and plugins archive, and reining in a site where editing rights were opened too wide falls within our optimization program.
Next part
With the regions settled, the values that fill them are next. The following part covers spacing: handing over a scale instead of throwing pixel numbers.